The secular Left’s weeklong meltdown notwithstanding, Americans should be grateful for the Alabama Supreme Court’s clarion affirmation of the Anglo-American legal tradition, as well as the inherent dignity and moral worth of unborn life.

The case, LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine, P.C., involved a negligent fertility clinic that failed to secure its cryogenic nursery. A hospital patient wandered into the clinic and accidentally killed several embryos. The legal question before the Court was whether the parents of the dead embryonic children could file suit against the clinic under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

As Justice Jay Mitchell explained in his straightforward majority opinion, the Alabama Supreme Court had held in an uninterrupted line of cases that an unborn child constitutes a “minor child” under the state’s wrongful death statute — regardless of stage of embryonic or fetal development. Crucially, neither the plaintiffs nor defendants contested this understanding, and the question was not before the court.