Alabama’s IVF Ruling Is Exactly What Conservatives Have Been Promising for Years
Issues
This excerpt is from a piece by Rakim Brooks that originally ran in Democracy Docket on March 4, 2024.
Still, for all of its parallels to other anti-choice decisions, Alabama’s ruling was not a run-of-the-mill anti-choice opinion. In his special concurrence, Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker spelled out his understanding that the court and the Republican-controlled Legislature were adopting a Christian-based view of personhood: “that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”
We’ve never seen such baldly religious talk in a modern judicial opinion. Indeed, Parker’s remarks were so grotesquely religious that advocates might well be empowered to challenge the ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Parker and his colleagues have established Christianity as the state religion.
In normal circumstances, such an appeal would bring a sigh of relief. That is until you remember that six of the justices recently overturned a 49-year precedent on spurious legal grounds to achieve their preferred result. Among them was Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who refused at her confirmation hearing to answer a direct question about whether she’d support the criminalization of IVF (again, every single Republican senator voted for her confirmation).