Wrongful Birth? An Oxymoron...

Posted by Greg Cruey Mar 13, 2006

With the issue in the news recently for a number of reasons, I came across a New York Times article that examines the legal concept of wrongful birth. The artcile looks first at a 2004 court case that ended in a multi-million dollar settlement. The woman who sued argued that if her doctors hadn't neglected to perform certain tests on her she would have learned that she was going to have a severely handicapped child -- and she could have and would have aborted it...

Wrongful birth is legal grounds to sue a doctor in a about half the states in the U.S. Personally, I think the concept is an oxymoron. For my own reasons - multiple and complex - I think that all human life is valuable. And I think that a HUMAN life (and the rights inherent therein) starts well before birth. I can state unequivocally that I don't believe ANYONE (not even a mother) has the right to simple end a human life except perhaps in the context of a capital crime. But I am aware that not everyone agrees with me.

The Times article examines some rough issues - issues I suspect we'll hear much more about in the next few years as the balance of the Supreme Court shifts.

One of the most interesting quotes from the NYT article is this: "No matter the legal context, terminating a wanted pregnancy is no one's first choice, but for the time being at least, when faced with a fetus that will become a severely handicapped child, ALL THE CHOICES ARE BAD. ... As Leon Kass, former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, has noted, in prenatal cases, often the only way to cure the illness is to prevent the patient." (Emphasis added.)

I have to wonder if ALL the choices are bad when you find out that your unborn child will have a disability, a handicap, or a predictable flaw. I don't think so...