ArcaMax

Leftists have spent much of the past week up in arms about a ruling last Friday from the Alabama Supreme Court.

At first blush, it is curious that a state supreme court case would engender so much vitriol and bellyaching. But the groaning from the left-wing media and political class can be easily explained: The Alabama case entails a dispute over the destruction of unborn human life, and there is no greater sacrament for the contemporary secular leftist than the destruction of unborn human life.

The secular Left's weeklong meltdown notwithstanding, Americans should be grateful for the Alabama Supreme Court's clarion affirmation of the Anglo-American legal tradition, as well as the inherent dignity and moral worth of unborn life.

The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., involved a negligent fertility clinic that failed to secure its cryogenic nursery. A hospital patient wandered into the clinic and accidentally killed several embryos. The legal question before the Court was whether the parents of the dead embryonic children could file suit against the clinic under Alabama's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

As Justice Jay Mitchell explained in his straightforward majority opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court had held in an uninterrupted line of cases that an unborn child constitutes a "minor child" under the state's wrongful death statute -- regardless of stage of embryonic or fetal development. Crucially, neither the plaintiffs nor defendants contested this understanding, and the question was not before the court.

The only legal question in LePage was thus whether the court should legislate from the bench and decree that which the Alabama Legislature had opted not to do itself: Read into the law an "extrauterine exception" that would retain the wrongful death statute's inclusion of unborn children developing in utero but remove legal protection for embryos developing outside the womb.

The court, appropriately, declined to do so.

That's it. That's the whole case.

A sterling concurring opinion from Chief Justice Tom Parker has attracted the most leftist outrage. Parker explored the meaning of a 2018 amendment to the Alabama Constitution, which stipulates: "This state acknowledges, declares, and affirms that it is the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life."

Parker correctly explained how the word "sanctity" cannot be understood in anything other than a religious context -- namely, the Judeo-Christian tradition that is America's great heritage. The "sanctity" of human life, he noted, is a concept that goes all the way back to the creation of man "in the image of God," as recorded in the Book of Genesis. Parker cited other verses from Scripture, including the famous verse from the Book of Jeremiah: "When I had not yet formed you in the womb, I knew you." He also cited other authoritative religious figures, such as John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.

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