Give an inch, take a mile Via Dispatches from the Religious Left, an analysis of the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling explaining how the judges scooped up this ball and rasn it in for a fringe-right touchdown. Chris Geidner writes: I’d like to focus instead on the majority opinion from Justice Jay Mitchell, which is extreme in its own ways — and highlights the dangerous faux-jurisprudence that the U.S. Supreme Court has encouraged. In order to reach its ruling, the court needed to ignore its own past precedents that congruence between the state’s criminal-homicide statute and wrongful-death statute was needed. This is important because the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. The court had justified expanding that civil law to fetuses in utero based on an expansion of the criminal law to include fetuses in utero and the claimed need for congruence between the two laws. Now that the court wanted to go further than the criminal law, it just ignored those rulings — overruling them without saying so, as Justice Greg Cook stated in his dissenting opinion. Or, as Justice Will Sellers wrote more bluntly, “To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain.” The court also went far afield of what was necessary for its ruling. After claiming that “[t]here is simply no … ambiguity” about the word “child” in the…