"Pro-life lawyers had complained before about the poor quality of state attorney’s attempts to defend restrictive abortion statutes. This time, they decided that they would take matters into their own hands. In 1971, they sent the Court their own amici curiae briefs to make the arguments that the state attorneys were unprepared to deliver. Charles Rice, a Notre Dame law professor who had been producing pro-life materials for years, filed a brief on behalf of the new pro-life organization Americans United for Life (AUL) reiterating the pro-life movements longstanding Fourteenth Amendment argument. Rice cited several decades’ worth of tort cases in which lower courts had awarded damages to plaintiffs who had lost an unborn child in an accident. In some of those cases, judges had explicitly recognized the personhood of the fetus. A group of lawyers led by Dennis Horan, also affiliated with AUL, filed another brief consisting of several pages of fetal photographs and other medical evidence to persuade the Court that medical science supported the pro-life movement’s claim that fetuses were human persons with constitutional rights. More than 200 pro-life doctors, including most of the leading medical professionals in the movement-Mildred Jefferson, Fred Mecklenburg, Joseph Stanton, and others-signed their names to the brief."