Let’s Thank the Alabama Supreme Court

I never thought I’d be grateful to the Alabama Supreme Court for anything, but now I am. With its decision deeming frozen embryos to be children under state law, that all-Republican court has done the impossible. It has awakened the American public, finally, to the peril of the theocratic future toward which the country has been hurtling.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that erased the constitutional right to abortion was an alert, too, of course, leaving Republicans scrambling to distance themselves from the fruits of the court they had populated with such glee only a few years earlier. The fact that religious doctrine lay at the heart of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was perfectly clear, as I observed then. Dobbs is usually discussed today as a conservative power play, however, rather than as a projection of a religious view of fetal life onto both a largely unwilling public and the Constitution itself.

But there’s no avoiding the theological basis of the Alabama court’s solicitude for “extrauterine children,” to use the majority opinion’s phrase. In a concurring opinion in which he referred to embryos as “little people,” Tom Parker, Alabama’s chief justice, rested his analysis on what’s become known as the Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment that Alabama voters added to the state’s constitution in 2018. “It is as if the people of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I sanctified you,’” the chief justice wrote.