The chief justice repeatedly invoked the Christian God to defend his extremist views

Between 2013 and 2016, three sets of parents in Alabama underwent in vitro fertilization treatments, hoping it would lead to the birth of a child. While some embryos were then implanted into the patients’ bodies (and led to successful births), others were placed in a “cryogenic nursery” at the Center for Reproductive Medicine, remaining frozen until further notice.

In 2020, a patient at the hospital slipped into the fertility clinic via an “unsecured doorway” and got access to the freezer. He removed the embryos—and then, likely due to their ice-cold temperature, dropped them. The embryos were destroyed.

The three sets of parents eventually sued the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the group overseeing it, the Mobile Infirmary Association. They said that the hospital’s negligence led to the destruction of their embryos in violation of Alabama’s “Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.”

To put that another way: They sued the hospital for killing their babies, arguing that life begins at conception, not birth.

The hospital asked the courts to reject the lawsuits because embryos aren’t people, and the law only applied to people. Indeed, that’s what Circuit Court Judge Jill Parrish Phillips said in her decision in April of 2022. She wrote that a frozen embryo wasn’t a “minor child.”

The plaintiffs appealed the decision, and the Alabama Supreme Court has now reversed the ruling, insisting on a 7-2 vote that embryos are indeed minor children—that “unborn children” fall under the definition of “minor child”—and that, therefore, the families have every right to sue the clinic.

Just as disturbing as the decision itself is how much theology is baked into the all-Republican Court’s decision. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Tom Parker couldn’t stop bringing religion into the picture when explaining the “sanctity of unborn life.”

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The Alabama Constitution's recognition that human life is an endowment from God emphasizes a foundational principle of English common law, which has been expressly incorporated as part of the law of Alabama…

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… But the principle itself—that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification—has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man "in the image of God." Genesis 1:27 (King James).

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… Finally, the doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment: "You shall not murder." Exodus 20:13 (NKJV 1982)…

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In summary, the theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. Section 36.06 recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life -- that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.

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The People of Alabama have declared the public policy of this State to be that unborn human life is sacred. We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. 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." Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982). All three branches of government are subject to a constitutional mandate to treat each unborn human life with reverence. Carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were, would be unacceptable to the People of this State, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image. For these reasons, and for the reasons stated in the main opinion, I concur

Nothing says “rule of law” like citing a personal myth no one’s allowed to question as justification for an extremist interpretation of a law. That Christian privilege went underreported in stories about the ruling, even though, if a non-Christian used similar “logic,” it would be the sole focus of the story.

It’s telling that Parker uses “We” as synonymous with “The People of Alabama,” as if an Alabama law passed by conservative zealots truly represents everyone rather than a select group of fundamentalists, as if there’s nothing he can do to stop it, as if everyone belongs to the same faith… that also happens to be his own. (Last year, Parker welcomed Christian Nationalist Sean Feucht to the state with what amounted to a sermon celebrating Jesus.)

This is the same “pro-life” Supreme Court, by the way, that recently allowed a man to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, an experimental method that had never before been tried on humans. (Parker dissented in that particular case but six of his colleagues were fine with it.) The execution was widely seen as a disaster.

The effect of this ruling also can’t be overstated.

If the five main fertility clinics in Alabama can now be sued over embryos that aren’t implanted, for whatever reason, you can bet they’ll shut down altogether, depriving otherwise infertile couples from having a baby at all. That’s partly because, to save time and money, fertility clinics create multiple embryos in case an implanted one fails or the couple chooses to have more children in the future.

That’s what the Medical Association of the State of Alabama wrote in a brief to the Court before the ruling:

“… The increased exposure to wrongful death liability as advocated by the Appellants would—at best—substantially increase the costs associated with IVF. More ominously, the increased risk of legal exposure might result in Alabama’s fertility clinics shutting down and fertility specialists moving to other states to practice fertility medicine.”

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Parents pay to store unused embryos. But sometimes embryos are destroyed or donated for research if there are genetic problems or if they are unlikely to develop normally in utero, the medical association said. Requiring fertility clinics to store all unused embryos forever would push up the costs for patients.

By forcing clinics to store all embryos indefinitely—or else!—the burden will become so overwhelming that it’ll be much easier to shut down entirely than risk litigation.

It’s a dangerous combination of anti-abortion zealots believing every sperm is sacred and Republican judges pretending that an acorn is the same as an oak tree because their God says so.

It’s not an uncommon belief among conservatives, though. In 2022, Dusty Deevers, now a GOP State Senator in Oklahoma, delivered a sermon in which he railed against IVF, saying that embryos “were incarcerated in frozen prisons,” referring to them as “cryo-orphans,” and urging the audience to love their “embryonic neighbors.” He also argued that parents who used IVF were “waging an assault against God.” Last November, a Catholic church in Florida refused to rent space to a woman who had publicly celebrated her IVF treatments.

What was once a fringe minority view—in 2013, only 12% of Americans said IVF was morally wrong—has now become the basis for Alabama law with the help of GOP lawmakers and their allies on the state’s Supreme Court. And there’s already proof that this decision is reverberating, with right-wing group Liberty Counsel already calling on Florida to make its laws just as extreme.