Left’s Rant Over Alabama Embryo Ruling Shows Historical Illiteracy

Leftists have spent a lot of the previous week up in arms a couple of ruling Feb. 16 from the Alabama Supreme Court.

At first blush, it’s curious {that a} state supreme court docket case would engender a lot vitriol and bellyaching. But the groaning from the left-wing media and political class will be simply defined: The Alabama case entails a dispute over the destruction of unborn human life, and there’s no larger sacrament for the up to date secular leftist than the destruction of unborn human life.

The secular Left’s weeklong meltdown however, Americans ought to be glad about the Alabama Supreme Court’s clarion affirmation of the Anglo-American authorized custom, in addition to the inherent dignity and ethical value of unborn life.

The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine P.C., concerned a negligent fertility clinic that didn’t safe its cryogenic nursery. A hospital affected person wandered into the clinic and unintentionally killed a number of embryos. The authorized query earlier than the court docket was whether or not the mother and father of the useless embryonic youngsters may file swimsuit towards the clinic beneath Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

As Justice Jay Mitchell defined in his straightforward majority opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court had held in an uninterrupted line of circumstances that an unborn baby constitutes a “minor child” beneath the state’s wrongful-death statute—no matter stage of embryonic or fetal growth.

Crucially, neither the plaintiffs nor defendants contested this understanding, and the query was not earlier than the court docket.

The solely authorized query in LePage was thus whether the court should legislate from the bench and decree that which the Alabama Legislature had opted to not do itself: Read into the regulation an “extrauterine exception” that might retain the wrongful-death statute’s inclusion of unborn youngsters creating in utero, however take away authorized safety for embryos creating outdoors the womb.

The court docket, appropriately, declined to take action. That’s it. That’s the entire case.

A sterling concurring opinion from Chief Justice Tom Parker has attracted the most leftist outrage. Parker explored the that means of a 2022 modification 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 appropriately defined how the phrase “sanctity” can’t be understood in something aside from a non secular context—specifically, the Judeo-Christian custom that’s America’s nice heritage. The “sanctity” of human life, he famous, is an idea that goes all the best way again to the creation of man “in the image of God,” as recorded within the Book of Genesis.

Parker cited different verses from Scripture, together with the well-known verse from the Book of Jeremiah: “When I had not yet formed you in the womb, I knew you.” He additionally cited different authoritative spiritual figures, comparable to John Calvin and Thomas Aquinas.

Because of the case’s holding and Parker’s colourful concurrence, many on the Left have denounced LePage as an imperious act of “theocracy” or “Christian nationalism.”

Nothing may very well be farther from the reality.

America was fairly actually based on the notion that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Thomas Jefferson, the person who penned these phrases, however redacted his Bible to take away these components he didn’t himself imagine, was in regards to the furthest factor conceivable from an Orthodox Christian. Yet even Jefferson held that our rights stream from our Creator—the very God, we all know from Genesis, who made man in His picture. The political idea of the American Founding is that man is made in God’s picture and that we accordingly possess sure rights that no different man or ruler can deny.

This just isn’t “theocracy.” It is fundamental American historical past—fundamental historic literacy.

No one was clearer in regards to the function of God within the American public sq. than George Washington, the best of all of the Founders, whose birthday we celebrated this week.

Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation started by explaining that “it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor.”

Washington then declared {that a} Thursday in late November must be “devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be.”

The Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in LePage was a simple case of statutory interpretation. But it additionally affirmed and upheld this broader, venerable custom.

The actuality is these decrying the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in LePage don’t merely hate unborn human life. They hate America itself.

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