Marshae Jones is an odd choice of hero for the cause, which is going to make the made-for-cable-TV movie a bit more difficult if they don’t take serious liberties with the facts.

Ms. Jones was five months pregnant and working at a company in Pleasant Grove that sells fuel for fires, when she got involved in an altercation in the parking lot of the Dollar General store.

The fight stemmed from a long-simmering feud with a female co-worker, Ebony Jemison, 23, over a man who worked at the same company. Ms. Jones spotted Ms. Jemison in the parking lot and started a fight with her, according to a law enforcement officer with direct knowledge of the investigation who did not want to be identified. By the officer’s account, Ms. Jones was winning the fight and had Ms. Jemison pinned in her car.

After taking repeated blows, the officer said, Ms. Jemison reached for a gun, and fired point blank into Ms. Jones’s stomach. Ms. Jones was driven to a hospital in a car that apparently broke down on the way. Paramedics eventually arrived and took her to a hospital, but her fetus — struck by a bullet — died.

But a pregnant women giving her love-rival a whupping hasn’t stood in the way of public outrage over Jones’ indictment in the death of her fetus. After a grand jury refused to indict Jemison for defending herself, it indicted Jones for manslaughter instead.

(a) A person commits the crime of manslaughter if:

(1) He recklessly causes the death of another person

This raises two questions, one of which provoked outrage based on Alabama law holding a fetus a “person” as of conception. The other question is whether Jones was reckless to initiate and engage in physical violence knowing she was five months pregnant.

As to the first question, there is serious doubt whether Alabama’s personhood law is constitutional under Roe v. Wade.

“Under Alabama law, life begins at conception,” said Bryan Fair, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Alabama School of Law. “The question is whether that is consistent with federal constitutional law.”

He said that in a case like Ms. Jones’s, the federal courts could be asked to decide whether the state law that defines a fetus as a person is trumped by the constitutionally protected rights to due process and equal protection, an uncertain prospect under the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

If this doesn’t really do much to explain the conflict, that’s largely the problem with Roe v. Wade, where Justice Blackmun, theoretically using science, decided that the mother’s equal protection and due process rights prevailed over the fetus’ rights. The choice was made by the Court that a fetus isn’t a person until birth.

The Alabama lege made a different choice. Because of the current fears of the Court reversing itself, advocates have backed into corners with increasingly polarized positions that allow for no accommodation of the troubling fact that Jones’ fetus died here. Whether one calls it an unborn baby or a fetus, a terrible thing happened, and clearly Jones wasn’t a poor victim of circumstance.

Does a pregnant woman have any duty of care for the unborn child she carries? How cavalier and cold have people grown that they care nothing about the survival of a fetus when the pregnancy wasn’t intended to be terminated? What if some random woman went around punching pregnant women in the belly? Would that be a simple assault at worst or something far worse, far closer to murder if it caused the fetus to die?

While people around the nation are outraged, the locals aren’t all that upset with this indictment.

But in Pleasant Grove, a city of 10,000 people on the western outskirts of Birmingham, the case appears to have caused little controversy. Gun rights are popular here. Reproductive rights are not. Many conversations in the city focused on how harshly Ms. Jones should be punished, not whether she was culpable.

There isn’t much question of whether Jones’ conduct was “reckless” as defined by statute.

RECKLESSLY.  A person acts recklessly with respect to a result or to a circumstance described by a statute defining an offense when he is aware of and consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk that the result will occur or that the circumstance exists.  The risk must be of such nature and degree that disregard thereof constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.

Few would dispute that it’s mindnumbingly stupid for a pregnant woman to initiate a physical fight, but stupid isn’t enough. Was Jones aware that Jemison was armed? Was she sufficiently conscious of the risk that giving Jemison a beating would create the risk of getting shot? Was the risk a gross deviation of conduct that a reasonable person would observe?

After all, Jones didn’t use a weapon on Jemison, and dangerous as hand-to-hand fighting may be to a pregnant woman, was the introduction of a gun into the situation obvious enough that she should be culpable for disregarding the risk?

But the question of recklessness isn’t one that concerns either the people of Pleasant Grove or the outraged activists decrying Alabama’s definition of personhood. The former take for granted that what Jones did was stupid enough that she deserved to be charged for her neglect of her unborn child, while the latter don’t care how reckless Jones was, as it was still just a fetus.

Bad facts make bad cases, and bad cases make bad law. Could this be the case that goes to the Supreme Court to test the constitutionality of Alabama’s personhood statuute? It’s possible, but this may not be the test case pro-choice activists want to push. Jones is no hero here, even if her actions fell short of criminality.

Regardless of whether the fetus can lawfully be a “victim,” Jones won’t be a particularly sympathetic protagonist when the movie comes out, no matter how imaginative the producers get with the script. The best result here is that the indictment be tested on recklessness, and fails, so that the movie never gets made.