Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed the state’s Human Life Protection Act on May 15, enacting one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the nation. The key provision of this statute renders it criminal for “for any person to intentionally perform or attempt to perform an abortion,” subject only to an exception where the abortion “is necessary in order to prevent a serious health risk to the unborn child’s mother.” The drafters of the legislation refused to add any amendment that would legalize abortions in the cases of rape and incest. The legislation specifically exempts women who have abortions from any form of civil or criminal liability, but it imposes sentences up to life imprisonment for any physician within the state who performs an illegal abortion.

The law is on a direct collision course with Roe v. Wade, which in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion, even though at the time of its passage abortions were commonly, but not universally, subject to criminal sanctions either by statute or at common law. Governor Ivey makes no bones about seeking a show-down. The Alabama laws punishing abortion are still on the books. She wants the Supreme Court to “revisit”—i.e. overrule—Roe and thinks that the latest Alabama law is the best way to force its hand. Predictably, the statute’s passage has generated intense dispute over abortions that center on the merits of the legislation and the likelihood that the Supreme Court will modify or strike down Roe.

The Alabama law classifies abortion as a felony form of homicide. Homicide in its simplest form is the deliberate and unlawful killing of one person by another. No one doubts that an abortion is a deliberate procedure, so the questions are: What is a person? And what are the justifications that make it lawful to kill another person? Abortion advocates defend against the charge of homicide on both grounds. On the first, their argument is that no one becomes a person until he or she is outside the womb. As CNN Contributor Christine Quinn put the point: “When a woman is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is a part of the mother.” That claim brought forth a fierce response by Alexandra DeSanctis, a staff writer at National Review. In an article addressing the abortion controversy, DeSanctis raised the simple point that the DNA of the child is distinct from that of the mother and father, and that it is thus absurd to claim that an unborn child with a heartbeat does not have the status of an independent person.