Today, the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that “the value of the life of an unborn child is no less than the value of the lives of other persons.”
The decision was handed down in the case of Jessie Phillips v. State of Alabama. One of the Justices (Justice Parker) wrote a concurring opinion in which he called on the United States Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“I urge the Supreme Court of the United States to reconsider the Roe exception and to overrule this constitutional aberration,”Judge Parker wrote. He also recommended that the Court “return the power to the states to fully protect the most vulnerable among us.”
The case involves Jessie Phillips, a man who murdered his wife while she was pregnant with their preborn child. Phillips was sentenced to the death penalty by a lower court but appealed his conviction on the grounds that his six to eight week old child should not be considered a person under Alabama law.
The Alabama Supreme Court Justices vehemently disagreed. Lifesite News has more details:
The Alabama legislature expressly enacted the “Brody Act” 12 years ago to protect pre-born babies. Under the Brody Act, the definition of a “person” includes “an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.” The Brody Act is consistent with numerous other sections of Alabama law which recognize the equal status of the child in the womb. In his powerful concurring opinion, Justice Parker noted that the old law was changed “with the expressed intent of addressing just the sort of double-murder of which Phillips was convicted.”
The national significance of this case cannot be understated, since the question of personhood has been the lynchpin to the so-called right to abortion, ever since Justice Blackmun erroneously wrote in Roe v. Wade that children in the womb are not persons and therefore not entitled to any of the fundamental constitutional protections.
Responding directly to Roe’s flawed ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously ruled that “unborn children are persons entitled to the full and equal protection of the law.”
Justice Parker, one of the court’s most vocal pro-lifers, wrote a separate concurring opinion specifically to emphasize how broadly and consistently the law and judicial decisions in Alabama and around the Country protect the rights of unborn children, and to contrast that with “the continued legal anomaly and logical fallacy that is Roe v. Wade.”
Justice Parker wrote in his concurring opinion, “It is my hope and prayer that the United States Supreme Court will take note of the crescendoing chorus of the laws of the states in which unborn children are given full legal protection and allow the states to recognize and defend the inalienable right to life possessed by every unborn child, even when that right must trump the ‘right’ of a woman to obtain an abortion.”
