Alabama Supreme Court ruling protects the unborn

I wanted to call attention to a decision by the Alabama Supreme Court in Ex parte Hicks. Here is link to the LifeNews story on the case. http://www.lifenews.com/2014/04/18/alabama-court-again-rules-unborn-children-deserve-legal-protection/

The case involved an interpretation of Alabama’s chemical endangerment statute, which prohibits exposing a “child” to a controlled substance. In the Hicks case, the Court interpreted “child” to include “all children, born and unborn, ” and therefore upheld the conviction of Sarah Hicks who exposed her unborn child to cocaine. Her child tested positive for the presence of cocaine at the time of his birth.

The concurring opinion by Justice Parker contained a critique of the United States Supreme Court decisions dealing with abortion. Justice Parker’s opinion included the following passage: “In contrast to the reasoning of Roe and Casey, Alabama’s reliance upon objective principles has led this Court to consistently recognize the inalienable right to life inherently possessed by every human being and to dispel the shroud of doubt cast by the United States Supreme Court’s violation of the law of noncontradiction. This sound foundation allows Alabama to provide refuge to liberty — the purported objective of the plurality opinion in Casey. Liberty will continue to find no refuge in abortion jurisprudence until courts refuse to violate the law of noncontradiction and, like Alabama, recognize an unborn child’s inalienable right to life at every point in time and in every respect. ”

Here is the conclusion of Justice Parker’s opinion: “To dispel the shroud of doubt shadowing our nation’s abortion jurisprudence, courts must have the courage to allow the law of noncontradiction to dismantle the ipse dixit reasoning of Roe, Casey, and Stenberg and recognize a child’s inalienable right to life at all stages of development. Until then, our grief is not for the Constitution alone; we also grieve for the millions of children who have not been afforded equal value, love, and protection since Roe.”

Richard M.

Richard Myers

Richard S. Myers, the Vice-President of UFL, is Professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law, where he teaches Antitrust, Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, Constitutional Law, and Religious Freedom. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Kenyon College and earned his law degree at Notre Dame, where he won the law school's highest academic prize. He began his legal career by clerking for Judge John F. Kilkenny of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Myers also worked for Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Washington, D.C. He taught at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law before joining the Ave Maria faculty. He is a co-editor of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives (Catholic University of American Press, 2004) and a co-editor of Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy (Scarecrow Press, 2007). He has also published extensively on constitutional law in law reviews and also testified before Congressional and state legislative hearings on life issues. Married to Mollie Murphy, who is also on the faculty at Ave Maria School of Law, they are the proud parents of six children - Michael, Patrick, Clare, Kathleen, Matthew, and Andrew. http://www.avemarialaw.edu/index.cfm?event=faculty.bio&pid=11705E7D4E0111010366