Abortion

Arizona Man Awarded $67,500 on Behalf of Aborted Embryo

The ex-husband of an Arizona woman who voluntarily took abortion pills in 2018 has won a civil lawsuit against the clinic that prescribed them.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 10.21.2026 1:50 PM

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An Arizona abortion clinic that didn't tell a pregnant woman about the physical characteristics of her 8-week-old embryo before prescribing abortion pills has been found liable in a case brought by the ex-husband of the pregnant woman, who didn't want her to get an abortion.

The ex-husband, Mario Villegas, was awarded $67,500 in a civil lawsuit accusing the clinic of violating an informed consent law that an Arizona court declared unconstitutional earlier this year.

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'A Dangerous Precedent'

The Lawyering Project, which represented the doctor and clinic being sued by Villegas, had warned that the case could "establish a dangerous precedent in Arizona concerning embryonic personhood and chill the provision of abortion care."

"A pre-viability embryo or fetus is not a person," says its website in a summary of the case, "and a physician cannot be subject to a wrongful death action for providing high-quality abortion care to a patient who wants an abortion."

In an August 2024 order, Judge Bryan B. Chambers of the Arizona Superior Court in Gila County agreed with the defendants that Arizona's wrongful death statute does not, as written, apply to the death of embryos. The court is "unwilling to expand the common law definition of 'person' as applied to the wrongful death statute to include all unborn children whether viable outside the womb or not," Chambers wrote.

But that doesn't mean he tossed Villegas' lawsuit entirely. And in a judgement released July 22 but largely unnoticed until this week, Chambers wound up holding that Villegas is entitled to $5,000 in statutory damages and $62,500 "in compensatory damages for his psychological, emotional, and physical injuries."

No one in the case alleges that Villegas' ex-wife—referred to in court documents as M.S.V.—was tricked, coerced, or generally uninformed about the abortion. The case turns on technicalities and Arizona's onerous, biased (and now barred) requirements for what abortion doctors must tell patients in order to obtain informed consent.

'Deprived of the love….of his child'

M.S.V's abortion took place in July 2018, when she was around eight weeks pregnant. At the Camelback Family Planning clinic in Phoenix, she was provided with information at least 24 hours before she could........

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