BREAKING: Alabama top court judge urges Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade

MONTGOMERY, Alabama, October 19, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Today, the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the case of Jessie Phillips v. State of Alabama that “the value of the life of an unborn child is no less than the value of the lives of other persons.” In a concurring opinion, Justice Parker boldly called on the 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,” wrote the Alabama Supreme Court judge, and recommended that the Court “return the power to the states to fully protect the most vulnerable among us.”

The case came before the Alabama Supreme Court when Jessie Phillips, a man convicted of murdering his wife and their pre-born child, appealed his conviction arguing that he shouldn’t receive the death penalty because his 6-8 week pre-born child should not be considered a person under Alabama law.

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.”

In his pleadings, Mr. Phillips had argued that since his child was not viable when the murders were committed, he was guilty of only killing one person and therefore not eligible for the death penalty. Justice Parker categorically rejected this argument, stating that “Phillips's crimes were capital not because he killed a pregnant woman but because he killed two persons.” Justice Parker added that, to the extent Phillips was arguing that his unborn child was less of a person because the baby was young (6-8 weeks), Justice Parker dismissed that argument as “entirely unconvincing in light of the natural law, Alabama law, and this Court’s numerous recent decisions consistently recognizing that an unborn child is a human being from the earliest stage of development and thus possesses the same right to life as a born person.”

This is not the first time that the Alabama Supreme Court has recognized the personhood of the pre-born child.

In 2014, in the case of Ex Parte Hicks, Chief Justice Moore wrote that "Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, states have an obligation to provide to unborn children at any stage of their development the same legal protection from injury and death they provide to persons already born.”

In the 2013 decision in Ankrom v. State of Alabama, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that pre-born children were persons under the chemical endangerment laws, explaining that “the decision of this Court today is in keeping with the widespread legal recognition that unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law” the court added, “the only major area in which unborn children are denied legal protection is abortion, and that denial is only because of the dictates of Roe.”

With the recent appointments to the United States Supreme Court made by President Trump, many pro-lifers are hoping that the time has finally arrived for the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing states like Alabama to protect the fundamental rights of pre-born children.

In today’s momentous ruling, Justice Parker echoes these sentiments and calls on the Supreme Court to act.

“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,” he said.

Gualberto Garcia Jones, Esq. is an attorney and the Policy Director of Personhood Alliance.

https://www.wnd.com/2018/10/shocker-court-rules-unborn-baby-a-person/

State Supreme Court: Roe v. Wade ‘patently illogical’
Shocking decision declares unborn baby is ‘a person’

The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that an unborn baby is a “person” under the law, and, consequently, the death of that person can be punished with execution.

Further, in a special concurrence, Justice Tom Parker called on the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that created a “right” to abortion.

“I write specially to expound upon the principles presented in the main opinion and to note the continued legal anomaly and logical fallacy that is Roe v. Wade,” he said. “I urge the United States Supreme Court to overrule this increasingly isolated exception to the rights of unborn children.”

Parker affirmed the Alabama court’s rationale that “unborn children are persons entitled to the full and equal protection of the law.”

He asserted Roe v. Wade is “without historical or constitutional support, carved out an exception to the rights of unborn children and prohibited states from recognizing an unborn child’s inalienable right to life when that right conflicts with a woman’s ‘right’ to abortion.”

“This judicially created exception of Roe is an aberration to the natural law … and common law of the states,” Parker said.

He noted the Alabama court’s opinion stated the “obvious truth that unborn children are people and thus entitled to the full protection of the law” in its decision to reject Jessie Phillips’ arguments “that the unborn child he murdered, Baby Doe, was not a ‘person’ under Alabama law.”

In the case, Phillips was charged with the murders of his wife and unborn child, and sentenced to be executed. The state Supreme Court affirmed the sentence, rejecting claims that Phillips could not be sentenced for the unborn child’s death because the child was not a “person.”

The fault in the Roe decision was cited by Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion.

He said the justices didn’t have the scientific evidence to determine if an unborn baby is a person, but “personhood” is the foundation of the case.

Blackmun wrote: “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”

The Alabama ruling is not the only one to point out to the U.S. Supreme Court that Roe was wrongly decided.

In August, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an Alabama law banning the gruesome, second-trimester abortion procedure in which limbs are removed from a baby’s body in the womb.

At the time, Chief Judge Ed Carnes lamented in his opinion that he was bound by U.S. Supreme Court precedent to rule against the state, writing that “dismemberment” is the best description of the procedure, which clinically is known as dilation and extraction.

“In our judicial system, there is only one Supreme Court, and we are not it,” he wrote, calling the high court’s history of abortion rulings an “aberration” of constitutional law.

And Judge Joel Dubina wrote separately to express his agreement with Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in Gonzales v. Carhart in which Thomas wrote, “I write separately to reiterate my view that the Court’s abortion jurisprudence,” including in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade, “has no basis in the Constitution.”

“The problem I have, as noted in the Chief Judge’s opinion, is that I am not on the Supreme Court, and as a federal appellate judge, I am bound by my oath to follow all of the Supreme Court’s precedents, whether I agree with them or not,” Dubina wrote.

The opinion had no use for the politically correct language of “choice” and “women’s rights.”

“This case involves a method of abortion that is clinically referred to as Dilation and Evacuation (D & E). Or dismemberment abortion, as the state less clinically calls it. That name is more accurate because the method involves tearing apart and extracting piece-by-piece from the uterus what was until then a living unborn child,” he wrote.

And a year ago, eight members of the Alabama Supreme Court revived a wrongful death claim against a physician even though the life that was lost was that of a “pre-viable” unborn child.

That ruling set the state in direct conflict with the Roe v. Wade decision.

The Alabama judges at the time criticized the Roe decision’s “incoherent standard” of viability.

The newest opinion notes that Alabama law states an unborn child is a person under the state’s intentional murder statute.

According to Liberty Counsel, “Justice Parker wrote separately to emphasize how broadly and consistently the law and judicial decisions in Alabama and around the country protect the rights of unborn children. This, Justice Parker said, contrasts with ‘the continued legal anomaly and logical fallacy that is Roe v. Wade.’”

In his opinion, Parker called on the Supreme Court to act: “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.”

He said that by ensuring broad legal protections for unborn children, including under Alabama’s capital murder statutes, “we affirm once again that unborn children are persons with value and dignity equal to that of all persons.”

“There is a growing chorus of voices urging the Supreme Court to overrule its abortion decisions,” said Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver. “The Supreme Court has created a constitutional aberration and caused incalculable harm by its abortion decisions. In 1992, Justice Kennedy voted with the majority to overrule Roe v. Wade, and then flipped his vote 30 days before the opinion was released to uphold Roe. It is time to correct course and overrule this horrible chapter in American and Supreme Court history.”

He continued: “We applaud Justice Tom Parker in calling on the Supreme Court to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision and once again protect precious children, women, and families. Abortion is simply a euphemism created by activists to soften what it really is: the murder of innocent unborn children.

“We must stop this human genocide. We must demand that the Supreme Court undo the horrendous ruling and make the womb a safe place again in America. As we hear about the horrible descriptions of the dismemberment of Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, every breathing person naturally shutters. Yet, every day in America, helpless, preborn children are dismembered while they are still alive. We too must shutter at this horrible act and stop it.”

Parker is currently an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and is running for the position of chief justice. Parker won the primary election on June 5, 2018.

In his new concurrence, Parker said a “person is a person, regardless of age, physical development, or location.”

“Baby Doe had just as much a right to life as did [mother] Erica Phillips. … Phillips was sentenced to death for the murder of two persons; Erica and Baby Doe were equally persons.”

He added: “In spite of voluminous state laws recognizing that the lives of unborn children are increasingly entitled to full legal protection, the isolated Roe exception stubbornly endures. … Some liberal justices on the United States Supreme Court adamantly defend the isolated Roe exception. I have written extensively explaining why the Roe exception lacks legal foundation and is patently illogical.”

The ruling, he said, “stands as an indictment against the United States Supreme Court.”

The only way it can continue, he said, is if the U.S. Supreme Court justices “insist, against all scientific evidence and reason, that unborn children are not human.”

When Does Life Begin? And 39 Other Tough Questions About Abortion

By Dr. John Ankerberg & Dr. John Weldon [excerpts]

In 1981, the United States Congress conducted hearings to answer the question, “When does human life begin?” A group of internationally known scientists from around the world appeared before a Senate judiciary subcommittee (85). Here is what the U.S. Congress was told:

Harvard University Medical School’s Professor Micheline Matthews-Roth, Principal Research Associate, stated, “In biology and in medicine, it is an accepted fact that the life of any individual organism, reproducing by sexual reproduction, begins at conception” (85; cf. 81:18; 72:149).

Dr. Watson A. Bowes, Jr. of the University of Colorado Medical School testified that “the beginning of a single human life is, from a biological point of view, a simple and straightforward matter—the beginning is conception. This straightforward biological fact should not be distorted to serve sociological, political, or economic goals” (100:114).

Dr. Alfred Bongiovanni of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School noted: “The standard medical texts have long taught that human life begins at conception” (100:114).
He added: “I am no more prepared to say that these early stages represent an incomplete human being than I would be to say that the child prior to the dramatic effects of puberty . . . is not a human being. This is human life at every stage, albeit incomplete, until late adolescence” (100:114).

Dr. McCarthy De Mere, who is a practicing physician as well as a law professor at the University of Tennessee, testified: “The exact moment of the beginning [of] personhood and of the human body is at the moment of conception” (100:114).

World famous geneticist, Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Professor of Fundamental Genetics at the University of Descarte, Paris, France, declared: “. . . each individual has a very unique beginning, the moment of its conception” (85; cf. 81:18).

Dr. Lejeune also emphasized: “The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence” (85; cf. 72:149).

The chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics at the Mayo Clinic, Professor Hymie Gordon, testified, “By all the criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception” (85; cf. 72:149).

He further emphasized: “. . . now we can say, unequivocally, that the question of when life begins. . . . is an established scientific fact. . . . it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception” (85; cf. 72:149; 81:18).

At that time the U.S. Senate proposed Senate Bill #158, called the “Human Life Bill.” These hearings which lasted 8 days, involving 57 witnesses, were conducted by Senator John East. This Senate report concluded:

Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being — a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writings. (85:7)

In 1981, only one scientist disagreed with the majority’s conclusion, and he did so on philosophical and not scientific grounds. In fact, abortion advocates, although invited to so, failed to produce even one expert witness who would specifically testify that life begins at any other point than conception (100:113).*

* A few held that life may begin at implantation. However, implantation, while important, in no way defines life.
Many other biologists and scientists agree that life begins at conception. All agree that there is no point of time or interval of time between conception and birth when the unborn is anything but human.

Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., is one of the twentieth century’s titans in the field of embryology and reproductive science. He was the first scientist to consistently achieve in vitro fertilization of human eggs. This prominent scientist emphasizes, “The zygote is human life” (100:40).

G. L. Flanagan observes, “From their first hour the human cells are distinctly human” (71:12 in 90).

Dr. Margaret Liley and Beth Day state: “A human life begins with a single cell” (71:17 in 91).

Axel Ingelman-Sundberg and Claes Wirsen assert that, “It is a living being from the moment of conception” (71:17 in 92).
World famous geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky states: “A human begins his existence when a spermatozoon fertilizes an egg cell” (71:16 in 93).

Another leading scientist, Ashley Montagu, confesses, “Every human being starts off as a fertilized egg” (71:16 in 94).

Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia states, “At the moment the sperm cell of the human male meets the ovum of the female and the union results in a fertilized ovum (zygote) a new [human] life has begun” (96:1087).

All of this evidence is why Professor Jerome Lejeune has stated: “If a fertilized egg is not by itself a full human being, it could never become a man, because something would have to be added to it, and we know that does not happen” (71:18). Biologically, no one can deny that we are human from conception.

In all stages of our growth, whatever the developing child is called, we are human. At birth humans are called babies. Inside the womb, humans are called “fetuses.” Before that, humans are called “embryos.” Before that, humans are planted on the uterine wall and called “blastocysts,” and before that, humans are called “zygotes.” Before that, only an individual sperm and egg existed, and not a human being.

Professor Roth of Harvard University Medical School has emphasized, “It is incorrect to say that the biological data cannot be decisive. . . . it is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when the egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and that this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life” (85; cf. 81:18; 72:149).

In conclusion, we agree with pioneer medical researcher, Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., Ph.D., that “. . . there is one fact that no one can deny: Human beings begin at conception” (24:16).

Again, let us stress that this is not a matter of religion, it is a matter of science. Scientists of every religious view and no religious view — agnostic, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, Christian, Hindu, etc. — all agree that life begins at conception. This explains why, for example, the International Code of Medical Ethics asserts: “A doctor must always bear in mind the importance of preserving human life from the time of conception until death” (101:317).

This is also why the Declaration of Geneva holds physicians to the following: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity” (101:317). These statements can be found in the World Medical Association Bulletin for January, 1950 (Vol. 2, p. 5) and April 1949 (Vol. 1, p. 22). In 1970, the World Medical Association again reaffirmed the Declaration of Geneva (101:317).

What difference does it make that human life begins at conception? The difference is this: If human life begins at conception, then abortion is the killing of a human life.

To deny this fact is scientifically impossible.*

*But to accept this fact and maintain that taking human life is not morally wrong is incredible. It is even reminiscent of Nazi Germany and yet today such arguments are increasingly accepted (e.g. 136:16).

FROM: When Does Life Begin And 39 Other Tough Questions About Abortion – John Ankerberg and John Weldon 1989

https://www.xinxii.com/gratis/122101rd1371492541.pdf

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