Alabama Supreme Court Justice Sarah Stewart, who concurred with the conservative court's controversial ruling equating frozen embryos with children, won the Republican primary Tuesday for state Supreme Court chief justice.
Stewart defeated former Republican state Sen. Bryan Taylor, the Associated Press projected.
The down-ballot race in ruby-red Alabama quickly took on increased importance amid the national uproar over the court’s ruling last month that created widespread effects on IVF care in the state.
That ruling prompted several IVF clinics in the state to halt their services and sparked broader concerns that anti-abortion-rights lawmakers could go after the medical procedure elsewhere.
The current chief justice, Tom Parker, wrote the majority decision, which drew heavily on theology, even citing the book of Genesis.
In the decision, he wrote that Alabama had adopted a “theologically based view of the sanctity of life” and that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”
In Alabama, state Supreme Court justices are elected in partisan races. Parker was barred from running again because he is older than the state’s mandatory retirement age for state Supreme Court justices, which is 70.
Stewart will advance to a November general election for the position against Democrat Greg Griffin, a Montgomery County circuit judge.
While Tuesday’s Republican primary results had no impact on the partisan makeup of the conservative court (all nine judges on the bench were either elected as Republicans or appointed by a Republican governor), the contest further escalated the already significant attention on the Alabama Supreme Court in the weeks since the controversial ruling.
In her current position as an associate Supreme Court justice, Stewart concurred with the majority decision. She has declined to publicly address the decision.
Her opponent Taylor, who describes himself as “a conservative pro-life Republican,” had said during the campaign he didn't disagree with the ruling, but posted on X that “we can uphold the sanctity of life without subjecting IVF clinics to lawsuit abuse.”
The top spender in the primary race had been an outside GOP group called Fair Courts America, which, as of last week, had spent about $650,000 in ads boosting Taylor, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which is tracking spending in the race. Fair Courts America is funded largely by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein.
In its ruling, the conservative state Supreme Court effectively ruled that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children.
The court found that people can be held legally responsible for destroying embryos under a state wrongful death law declaring that an unjustified or negligent act leading to a person’s death is a civil offense.
Lawmakers in Alabama have scrambled to pass a bill to protect IVF in the wake of the ruling. Final passage of a narrowly tailored bill that would provide doctors, clinics and other health care personnel who provide IVF treatment and services with civil and criminal “immunity" is expected Wednesday.
