COURT UPHOLDS “RIGHT NOT TO BE BORN”
PARIS, JULY 15, 2001 (Zenit.org).-
This country’s highest court of appeal has ruled that disabled children are entitled to compensation if their mothers were not given the chance to abort them, Agence France-Presse reported.
The ruling follows a case brought by three families with physically deformed children, who argued that if doctors had detected the unborn children’s disabilities they would have had abortions instead.
Physicians, activists for the disabled, and pro-life groups have reacted with outrage, describing the decision by the Cour de Cassation as an incentive toward eugenics, news reports said.
The ruling last week upheld a landmark decision which awarded a mentally retarded boy damages last year because he had not been aborted. The case was widely described as establishing in law a disabled child’s “right not to be born.”
The Collective to Stop Discrimination against the Disabled responded angrily. “This is a real act of phobia,” it said. “Now parents are going to be attacked and seen as irresponsible because they gave birth to a handicapped child.” Doctors say the fear of being sued for a misdiagnosis would encourage them to recommend abortions at the slightest hint of a disability.
“The ruling means that the handicapped have no place in our society,”said Yves Richard, a lawyer representing the medical profession.
Re: So things here in the States are not as bad perhaps as w
Well, it is a little bit more complicated than that: The sibling of the child named in the first suit, the Peruche case, came down with rubella (German measles) during the mother’s pregnancy. The mother went to her doctor and asked to be tested, to see if she had immunity and stated that she would terminate the pregnancy if she had contracted the disease – exposure of foetuses to rubella always results in birth defects. Due to an error in testing the doctor’s clinic told the mother that she was immune and the infant safe and she continued the pregnancy. The son was born deaf, mute, partially blind, profoundly retarded and suffering from heart defects. It is, I believe, uncontested that, under French law, the parents could claim damages against the clinic for depriving them of the right to make an informed decision due to the clinic’s error. What is so ethically troubling about this case is that the parents also filed suit for damages on behalf of their son to try to cover some of the costs of the special institution in which he lives. The doctors claimed, in their defence, that because the condition was not treatable, that the information provided could only have helped his parents make the choice to terminate the pregnancy or not and but didn’t deprive the child of any needed treatment and so, in order for the boy to claim damages, it would have to be argued that his parents had been deprived of the right to end his life. The court did not respond to this argument in its decision but merely found the clinic at fault and forced them to pay substantial damages. The cases mentioned in this article were thrown out because they did not match the fact pattern of the Peruche case. While the interpretation of the handicapped groups and the arguments of the doctors therefore have a lot of weight and the decision, rightly in my opinion, caused a great deal of controversy in France, it does (deliberately, I fear) misconstrue the situation to say that the boy was ‘awarded damages because he was not aborted.’ It is worth noting that “Zenit – the World Seen From Rome”, a Catholic news service is perhaps somewhat less than impartial and fully objective in their re-telling of an AFP article. I’m neither a parent nor married and have never had to even think about what decision I would make in this kind of situation, but would be reluctant to label someone else who’d surely faced a heartbreaking choice as ‘disgusting’ as the last post-er did.
THIS IS DISGUSTING…! I’m sorry,I can’t say anything more.