At its core, the idea of a “wrong­ful birth” claim is unreason­a­ble and ethically incoherent. Par­ents who bring these lawsuits against obstetri­cians and hospitals claim that medi­cal professionals should have de­tected a particular disease or de­fect in their unborn baby through prena­tal testing and informed them about it. Had they been given this infor­mation, their argument contin­ues, they would have chosen to abort their baby, rather than spending years of their lives caring for a less-than-perfect, possibly infirm child. Wrong­ful birth lawsuits enable the par­ents to seek legal redress, often in the form of multi-million dollar settle­ments.

In 2013, for example, a jury in Washing­ton state awarded a $50 mil­lion payout to a couple who claimed they would have aborted their five-year-old son Oliver if they had known he had an “unbalanced chromoso­mal translocation.” Be­cause of the mismatched chromo­somes he received from his parents, he has an IQ of less than 70 and is una­ble to walk.

Rachelle Harz, a malpractice law­yer who spearheaded one of these lawsuits in New Jersey in 1999, ex­pressed some of the tortu­ous think­ing that goes into these cases dur­ing an interview for 60 Minutes. She noted that although the physi­cian in this case, “didn't cause the child's retardation, what he caused was not giving the proper infor­mation to the parents to allow them the choice to abort the child.” She concluded that the doc­tor “caused the birth of this very, very neurologically impaired child.”

The fundamental flaw in her argu­ment, of course, is the claim that the doctor “caused the birth” of the baby, when, in fact, the birth was caused by an activity that took place nine months prior be­tween the husband and wife. That ac­tion of the mom and dad, not an ac­tion by the doctor, re­sulted in the birth.

What the doctor actually “caused” by not discovering and shar­ing specific medical infor­ma­tion with the parents was the preserva­tion of the child’s life. These law­suits rely on fundamentally flawed logic: first, that it is wrong and illegal for a doctor not to know or to withhold medical in­for­mation such that a life that would have been ended is saved; se­cond, that a doctor is somehow obli­gated to facilitate or cooper­ate in harmful or lethal actions that par­ents in­tend to carry out against their own offspring. The medical pro­fes­sion, however, has long pro­fessed allegiance to the creed of “do no harm,” so that doctors can serve uniquely as healers, not killers. For obstetricians in par­ticular, the un­born children they track and follow dur­ing pregnancy count as that doc­tor’s pa­tients in the same way that the moth­ers do. 

Whenever a couple sets out with the intention of aborting an imperfect child and requests that prenatal test­ing be performed for this purpose, the pro­cess of testing itself becomes im­moral. In the same way, any physi­cian or health care professional who ar­ranges for such tests, if they have pruden­tial certainty that a couple in­tends to abort an imperfect child, would be guilty of cooperating in evil when that abortion takes place.

To consider a parallel example, if a physician believed that a child arriv­ing to the hospital emergency room had been physically abused or severely beaten by his parents, he would be duty-bound, not to mention legally obli­gated, to report that abuse to authori­ties. He would not be per­mit­ted to turn a blind eye, or other­wise cooper­ate in the ongoing harm to that child by his or her parents. Similarly, obstetri­cians who work with pregnant cou­ples should not be expected to turn a blind eye and pro­vide diagnostic infor­mation to parents that will encour­age them fatally to assault their un­born child. 

None of us is perfect. None of us is born into this world completely free of defects, whether physical or psychologi­cal. Those limitations, how­ever, never entitle others to place our lives in the crosshairs and pull the trig­ger — especially our own parents! In sum, these wrongful birth cases pro­mote catastrophic misunder­standings about parental duties and about the physi­cian’s obligations to­wards moth­ers and their children in prenatal care set­tings.

Recognizing that some parents will face considerable expense, labor and difficulty in raising a child who re­quires special care and attention due to disabili­ties, it seems reasonable to pro­mote a pro-life and supportive re­sponse on behalf of these families, ra­ther than encouraging the corrosive prac­tice of wrongful birth lawsuits. That supportive response should in­clude the expectation of everyone chip­ping in and helping out, whether through insurance, taxes or crowd-funding, or through other forms of civic, societal or ecclesial outreach.

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