At least it is to me.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/reuters20001103_2792.html
“Son we love you, but had we known you were going to be fucked up we would have aborted you. But, well, fuck,here you are, so damnit we want some money.”
Ugh.
There is a family history of SEVERE, UNCONTROLLABLE epilepsy coupled with mental retardation on my husband’s side of the family.
When I was pregnant we did all sorts of genetic testing and jumping through hoops knowing that if anything was wrong, we would have ended the pregnancy. This was a HUGE debate with my husband and I, not the abortion part, but exactly what “defects” were “acceptable.”
Neither of us could come up with an answer and luckily we never had to decide. I do believe that a blind, deaf and mentally retarded baby wouldn’t have made our screening process though.
However, I believe that suing about it is just horrible. I pray that the child is never capable enough to understand what his parents are doing, it’s just bad. 
I seem to recall a case in Ohio where a severly handicapped girl is suing the hospital where she was born because they didn’t let the mother abort her or similar. I am attempting to locate a cite.
I’m a big fan of pro choice, but retroactively?
Wow. Humanity will never cease to amaze me.
Sounds like someone aborted these people’s common sense.
It’s not completely unheard of. Search the web for “wrongful birth” or “wrongful life”; you’ll turn up quite a few similar cases.
1983?!?
It took them 17 years to decide to sue? That alone should cause the judge to throw the case out, legal issues aside.
I mean, what the hell have these people been doing these last 17 years, other than thinking up new ways to not love their son.
Actually, there is a lot of conflicting jurisprudence on this issue in the U.S. One example of a decision in this area by the Supreme Court of Nevada is Greco v. United States, 111 Nev. 405, 893 P.2d 345 (1995). A web site with a research guide for finding materials in this area may be found here.
The “decision” isn’t actually a decision yet. The report’s last line states that the court will render its verdict on November 17.
I am loathe to open up a debate on the relative morality or ethics of bringing a suit on this basis, particularly considering the time that has elapsed since the child’s birth, but it seems as if they might have a point. Although I am not a lawyer or legal scholar of any type, legal question does not seem, at least on first glance, to be that complicated. The report also makes mention of a previous legal decision that had “…already established medical fault in the case…” This certainly implies that the doctors in question were negligent in not diagnosing the onset of rubella that caused the disabilities to the fetus while in utero. As such, the question, at least in my mind, becomes a matter of whether the parents are legally entitled to monetary compensation because they were denied the information that would have allowed them to make an informed decision. The moral issues aside, the report treats the option to abort the fetus as a ‘normal’ and legal option for the parents to contemplate. As such, they seem to have been denied access to a medical procedure that was available to all the other patients in the same situation, due to the negligence of the doctors.
It seems very easy to label their motivations for bringing this suit, and assume that the parents regret the birth of the child or even that they do not love him/her. I am not an expert, in any way, on raising a child with disabilities; I’m involved only in the most peripheral way. However, I do know there are a number of people on the board who have to grapple with the problems each and every day. It strikes me that there could be a number of financial costs that parents in this situation would have to face that parents raising a child who does not have disabilities would not have to face. As for myself, it seems just as likely the parents might be dealing with a mountain of medical bills or costs that other parents may not have to face.
I am not unmindful of the emotional connotation of bringing this suit 17 years after the actual events and I can only speak for myself. But if the doctor’s negligence actually prevented them from making an informed decision in the first place, it’s not a legal stretch to find that they are also responsible for compensation to the parents for the effects of the original negligence.
<blesses the use of preview while editing out a couple of references that Billdo and Max already mentioned>