As a result of the Supreme Court ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade last week, most abortions are now illegal in the state of Alabama.

According to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the “Alabama Human Life Protection Act” passed by the legislature in 2019 is now in effect. This means providing an abortion is now considered a class A felony under state law.

Former U.S. Attorney Jay Town says there are many “unintended consequences” to the new law that will have to be clarified by the Alabama Legislature in the next session.

Tuesday, Town discussed the ramifications of the decision on FM Talk 106.5’s “Midday Mobile.”

“The legislature is really going to have to consider everything they have done,” Town said. “There’s so many unintended consequences, especially when you pass a law like they did.”

The former U.S. Attorney warned that under one interpretation of the abortion law, there was a possibility a person could be prosecuted for merely helping someone travel to another state where abortion was still legal.

“I’m not sure if two people or 10 people conspiring to drive across state lines to an abortion-friendly state to have an abortion is not a conspiracy to commit murder,” he said, “because the act itself that is conspired to is murder by definition in the state of Alabama.”

Town said lawmakers would have to address some of the uncertainties surrounding the new rules.

“It’s an incredibly complicated issue that the state of Alabama’s legislature is going to have to deal with,” he admitted, “because the law as it is right now, whatever your views are on abortion, is still incomplete. Do we really want to prosecute someone for letting someone borrow their car, or filling up their gas tank so they can drive to wherever? And if we don’t, then we need to carve that out. If we do, then leave the law as it is right now.”

He said it was now up to the legislature to clarify these issues and give proper guidance to law enforcement in prosecuting these cases.

“There’s going to have to be some cleaning up of this law,” he argued, “just to make sure that the intent of the legislature is clear so that district attorneys across the state can use their discretion wisely, and that’s all I think any of us should be able to ask, a clear understanding of the law and who it applies to.”

Town also reminded people that arguments over abortion in America were not going away any time soon.

“Abortion is still legal in the United States,” he explained. “There’s been a great deal of misinformation out there that suggests that the Dobbs case made abortion unlawful or unconstitutional. It didn’t. We have 50 laboratories and those laboratories are going to decide just like we do with speed limits and other things, and if you believe that abortion is a right to privacy and a constitutional right of a woman, I understand that. It’s a very personal argument, and I think we can be pro-life and still understand people’s vantage point, but that’s not what the court said in Dobbs.”

Town continued, “So, now those arguments are going to have to be held in those 50 labs and those 50 legislatures, and this debate is going to continue for years and years and decades at the state level. And frankly, that’s probably where this debate should have been raging in the first place.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” Weekdays 9-11am on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee