Wrongful Life?

CourtTV reports on a case in Australia where a permanently disabled woman is suing the doctor that “allowed her to be born.” The plaintiff is asking for the expenses associated with a lifetime of being “mentally retarded, spastic, deaf and blind.”

Allegedly the doctor misdiagnosed a case of rubella in the first trimester of the mother’s pregnancy. The mother claims if she had known, she would have opted for an abortion rather than give birth to a potentially seriously disabled child.

It’s the child, now 24 years old, that has brought the case, or perhaps more accurately, a guardian has filed the case on her behalf. A statute of limitations prevents the parents from suing.

Well, well, what does one make of this? Interestingly the article says that this isn’t the first case in this vein and discuses three others, a second Australian case, one in New York and another in California. Only the case in California appears to have had any success. There, reports CourtTV, “an appeals court found a testing laboratory responsible for the medical costs associated with the care of a child whose parents were not informed of the potential for a certain genetic disease being passed onto the fetus.”

I guess I can understand folks suing under these circumstances. If they had been given the proper information, an abortion might have been an option which raises an interesting moral question. Under these circumstance, how is preventing the fetus from developing any different from infanticide once the child is born?

They’re different only because one is legal and the other isn’t. I would imagine this would be the line of the Right to Life Tribe. But what kind of quality of life are we talking about? Doesn’t that matter?

Of course it does. I don’t see condemning the unborn child to a lifetime of misery as particularly taking the moral high ground.