[This is a special addition to the “Wholly Pro-Life” series, examining the series’ central claims against the created world every human body depends on to survive.]

Water They Were Told Was Safe

For years, residents of Jackson, Mississippi lived with a municipal water system that leached lead into what came out of the tap. Four of them, Priscilla Sterling, Raine Becker, Shawn Miller, and John Bennett, eventually sued the city. Their claim was specific: officials knew the water was contaminated and told residents it was safe to drink anyway.^[1]

In September, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, ten to five, that none of this violated the Constitution. Whatever happened to these residents, the court held, the Fourteenth Amendment offers them no remedy for it. The ruling does not deny that the water was contaminated, or that officials may have misrepresented its safety. It simply holds that whatever wrong occurred, the Constitution does not reach it.

That ruling is where this piece starts, but it is not really about one lawsuit or one circuit court. It is about a question this series has asked six times already in six other settings: when an institution declines to protect something a human body needs, on grounds too technical for anyone to have to say directly what has actually been decided, and about whom. This time it is the water that comes out of a tap, something most people never think to ask whether it is actually safe.

What This Article Is Not Arguing

Water is not the only place this same pattern is showing up right now. The Environmental Protection Agency recently moved to stop limiting power-plant emissions, a decision with direct consequences for the air people breathe. Now, this article is not an argument about that decision or about climate policy generally. That is a live, contested political fight with real people of good faith on more than one side of it, and wading into which regulatory approach is correct is not what this piece is for. Whatever one believes about the best path forward on energy policy, that debate is a different one from the question this article actually asks.

Nor is this an argument that courts should recognize every claim brought before them, or that the Fifth Circuit’s specific legal reasoning was wrong as a matter of constitutional doctrine. Judges disagree about how far due process protections extend, and reasonable legal minds can land in different places on where the line for a viable claim sits. Constitutional interpretation is genuinely difficult work, and this article does not pretend to settle it.

What this article is examining is narrower: what it means when a legal system built to protect a great many things – property, contracts, procedural fairness – declines to formally protect a body’s claim to safe water, not through anyone announcing that claim matters less, but through a technical absence of “historical tradition” recognizing it. The target is the mechanism, not the specific doctrine that carried it this time, and not the judges who applied that doctrine in good faith according to their own reading of the law.

This distinction matters because the alternative, treating every institutional limit as evidence of malice, would make honest disagreement impossible and would also be untrue to what actually happened here. Ten judges reached a considered legal conclusion through a process built for exactly that kind of reasoning. The question this article asks is not whether they reasoned correctly by the standards of their own discipline. It is what happens to a family’s actual, physical need for safe water when the only tool available to protect it turns out not to reach that far.

Is There a Clean Water Constitutional Right?

The residents did not argue the Constitution explicitly guarantees clean water. They argued something narrower: that government-caused exposure to a known contaminant violated their right to bodily integrity, and that officials increased the danger while withholding or misstating information about it. That is a more modest claim than a general right to clean water, closer to an argument that the government cannot knowingly poison people and lie about it without consequence.

Writing for the majority, Judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. Constitutional protections for bodily integrity, he wrote, have historically involved direct government interference: forced medical procedures, involuntary medication, physical assault by an officer. Mismanagement of a municipal water system, however severe, falls outside that established category. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” the majority concluded. It is undisputed, the court said, that the Constitution does not guarantee clean water. Even if a due process violation had been established, the majority added, the individual officials would still be shielded by qualified immunity, since no clearly established precedent had put them on notice that their conduct crossed a constitutional line.

Five judges disagreed, in a dissent joined by four colleagues. They noted that ten other federal circuits already recognize some version of a “state-created danger” doctrine, covering situations where government officials create or increase a danger that later causes harm, and that the facts here mirrored the Flint water crisis closely enough to warrant the same analysis. The Fifth Circuit, the dissent noted, has spent decades declining to either adopt or definitively reject that doctrine, leaving residents in this circuit with less protection than residents facing identical harm almost anywhere else in the country. That inconsistency, more than the specific outcome, is what the dissent found hardest to accept: not that the court reached a wrong answer, but that it has refused for so long to commit to any answer at all.

The ruling does not strip away Jackson’s existing statutory water protections; the city remains under court-ordered oversight for its infrastructure separately, and the Safe Drinking Water Act still applies regardless of this outcome. But for these four residents, and anyone else in a similar position going forward within this circuit, no clean water constitutional right exists to bring into a federal courtroom. Whatever remedy remains available to them will have to come from somewhere other than the document that is supposed to set the floor beneath which no government may fall.

The Same Sorting Mechanism

Notice what the majority opinion does not say. It does not say these residents’ bodies matter less than a prisoner’s, or a suspect’s, or anyone else whose bodily integrity claims the Constitution does protect. It says, in effect, that no one built a category for this particular harm before now, and a court cannot create one simply because the harm is real and severe. That is a genuinely different claim from “your suffering does not matter,” and it is worth taking the majority at its word that this is what they actually mean. But a claim can be technically different from an insult and still function identically to one, if the practical result is the same absence of protection either way.

This is the same pattern this series keeps finding in different settings: a courtroom built for one party’s interest while another’s went unrepresented, not because anyone said the second party mattered less; a category that quietly decided who counted as trying hard enough to deserve help, so no one had to make that judgment aloud; and a criterion that filtered for self-sufficiency under the cover of clinical neutrality, letting a committee apply a standard rather than make a decision. Here the sorting tool is a doctrine of constitutional interpretation rather than a courtroom procedure or a medical criterion, but the shape is identical: a facially neutral technicality does the excluding, and the exclusion never has to announce itself as a judgment about whose need counts.

The deeper problem is not this one ruling. It is what the pattern reveals about how legal protection gets distributed generally. Some claims arrive already formalized, litigable, backed by centuries of precedent developed in eras that had their own blind spots about whose harms deserved a remedy. Others get redirected toward other remedies, voting out officials, pursuing a tort claim, waiting for legislatures to act, even when the harm is as basic and severe as lead in the water a family drinks every day. Dignity, on this logic, is only as protected as legal history happened to already decide it should be, and legal history has never been neutral about which bodies got protected first or which harms it thought serious enough to name.

For a family like the Sterlings, these alternatives are thin comfort. Voting out an official takes years and does not undo lead already absorbed into a child’s developing brain. A tort claim requires resources, time, and a legal system that may apply the same reluctance to novel harms in a different courtroom. Waiting for a legislature to act asks a family already living with contaminated water to trust the same political process that allowed the contamination to continue in the first place. Each of these remedies counts for something. None of them is what a constitutional right would have provided: a floor beneath which the government simply may not fall, regardless of which officials are currently in office or how a particular legislature happens to be composed this term.

Dust, Breath, and a Body’s Claim on the Earth

Genesis does not treat a body’s dependence on the material world as incidental to its dignity. It is the material the image was placed into from the very beginning. God forms the man from the dust of the ground, and only then breathes into him the breath of life, and the man becomes a living creature (Gen. 2:7). There is no earlier version of the image-bearer that exists apart from dust and breath. Water, air, and soil are not resources a soul happens to need while temporarily housed in a body. They are the actual substance the image was formed from and continues to depend on for every next breath, every glass of water, every meal grown from soil that has to remain capable of growing it.

This is why the dominion given to humanity in Genesis 1:28 cannot be read as unlimited license. The very next chapter specifies what that dominion looks like in practice: God places the man in the garden “to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). The Hebrew verb translated “keep” is the same word used elsewhere for a priest guarding sacred space or a shepherd guarding a flock, not a term for extraction without limit. Dominion was given alongside a charge to guard the very thing dominion was exercised over, not instead of it. A steward who works a field while destroying its capacity to keep producing has not fulfilled half of the mandate while ignoring the other half. Instead, he has failed at the only mandate that was actually given, since the working and the keeping were never separate instructions.

A body’s claim to the water and air it needs was never something Scripture treats as contingent on precedent, on which century a legal doctrine happened to develop in, or on whether a court can locate an established historical tradition recognizing it. That claim was built into the material of the body itself, at the moment God formed it from dust and gave it breath. No ruling, however carefully reasoned, changes what a body was made of or what it still needs to keep living. A court can decide what remedy exists in a federal statute; it cannot revise the terms on which a human body was actually created, or how long that body can survive without the things Genesis says it was made from and depends on.

The Same Claim, New Terrain

This series was originally planned as six installments, testing one claim against six different places it gets costly to hold: a courtroom, a sorting mechanism, a safeguard, a belief, a transplant list, and a legal category that never quite got built. This piece was added after the fact, once the same claim turned out to reach terrain the original plan had not covered: the created world itself, and a body’s claim on the parts of it no one can survive without.

The Jackson residents’ case will likely end here, absent further appeal. That outcome does not settle the deeper question this series has asked in every other setting. A legal system can decline to recognize a claim, can find no historical tradition to anchor it in, can redirect a family toward remedies slower and less certain than the one they sought. It cannot revoke what a body was actually made of, or what that body still needs in order to keep living. Every argument this series has made in those six settings applies here with the same force, because it was never really six separate arguments. It has been one claim all along, tested against whatever terrain made it most expensive to hold.

Dignity was never a matter of which precedent a court could locate. It was given in dust and breath, long before any court existed to rule on it, and it remains given regardless of what any ruling decides. A body formed from the ground and animated by God’s own breath does not need a judge’s permission to have a legitimate claim on the water and air that sustain it. That claim was settled before there was a Constitution to interpret, and it will still be true after every court that has ever ruled on it is gone.

Questions for Reflection

• Where have you let an institution’s silence stand in for actual safety, the way Jackson residents were told the water was fine and had no easy way to check for themselves?
• How does thinking of your own body as formed from dust and given breath change how you think about its material needs?
• What would it look like, practically, to treat “keeping” creation as seriously as Scripture treats “working” it?
• Where in your own community do you see a basic need going unprotected because no formal category exists for it?
• Does the distinction this article draws, between debating policy and naming a mechanism, feel like a real distinction to you, or a dodge?

Prayer Points

• Ask God to show you where you have treated creation as something to use without also being called to keep it.
• Pray for communities still living with contaminated water or air, that protection would come regardless of whether a court ever formally requires it.
• Ask the Lord to give wisdom to those who make decisions about environmental stewardship, whatever their role or position.
• Pray for The Gospel Lens as this series and its addition close, that readers would carry its central claim into every place they are tempted to think it does not reach.

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^[1]Sterling v. City of Jackson, 5th Cir., en banc, No. 24-60370, decided September 4, 2026. See coverage in Bloomberg Law, “Jackson Residents Lose Bid to Revive Water Contamination Claims,” news.bloomberglaw.com; The Hill; and Law Commentary. Majority opinion by Judge Kurt Engelhardt; dissent by Judge Catharina Haynes, joined by four other judges. Accessed September 18, 2026.