Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarantee what happened to Ms. Harriton.
I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive…
Why should a doctor be liable for an ‘act of God’? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect.
Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one’s fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons.
We live in the Age of The Victim. And under the tranzis, it will only get worse.
“Harriton counsel Bret Walker told the court that her mother should have been told of the consequences if the pregnancy went full term. Had the mother been made aware of the disabilities, she would have aborted the pregnancy, he said.
Keeden Waller, who was born through in-vitro fertilisation and is now three years old, is also claiming “wrongful life” after inheriting a clotting disorder from her father that was detectable in foetal testing.
The New South Wales Court of Appeal last year decided in a 2-1 judgment to reject the claims but both won special leave to bring their case to the High Court.”
Hindustan Times
Three years old and claiming “wrongful life.”
Uh-huh.
Joshua – you don’t understand it! These people are entitled to a perfect life!
Keedon Waller’s mother obviously decided that nature had robbed her of her right to have a child, so she organised one anyway. And then, jeeeeze! – would you believe it? – it came with a flaw! A clotting disorder inerited from her father, who is presumably an anonymous donor. And, goddam it, she can’t send the defective kid back!
Keedon Waller’s mother should have taken the hint from Mother Nature. Maybe it was Nature’s opinion that these genes not be passed on.
So how mentally disabled is she if can supposedly look at her situation and reason her way to affixing responsibility in a manner that many people that we don’t consider mentally disabled would? While she’s at it why doesn’t sue all the world’s denominations since God didin’t call her to Heaven directly from the womb?
Perhaps the disgraceful anti-immunisation lobby might like to make a comment. After all MMR would have reduced the mother’s chances of rubella infection to nearly zero. It’s never been safer to have a child, and never been more dangerous to be a doctor delivering one (or delivering antenatal care). Hopefully the courts will strike this down, and quickly.
Hopefully the courts will strike this down, and quickly.
Being hopelessly American, I’m taking the High Court to be equivalent to a US Supreme Court or the US Supreme Court. If that’s right then “Court of Appeal” remains unclear. In the US that would be a court to which you appeal a lower court ruling.
Since it was an invitro (sp?) pregnacy, shouldn’t she be suing the parents – after all, they hired the doctor!
The woman is called ‘Alexia’? Oh dear. Naming your disabled daughter after a mental dysfunction, such… wit.
Yes, you are being a little harsh. I can sort of see the general gist of your argument, but the way it’s expressed and some of the follow-up comments above are very insensitive to what must be an extremely distressing situation for the people involved.
You appear to be assuming that all legal action is launched for frivolous self-interest. Litigation is (shamefully) the only way that most of us have of holding the medical profession to account. It’s a doctor’s job to clearly articulate to patients what the possible outtcomes of an illness might be, and if this wasn’t done then it’s professional incompetence.
There are plenty people who are far more deserving of ridicule for frivolous litigation than this appalling case.
(I’m not a lawyer, by the way, but I do have a son whose life might well be a lot easier without some startling incompetence by midwives at his birth. And no, I haven’t sued anyone about it and don’t intend to).
“Wrongful Life” lawsuits have become far more common than you may realize.
So the woman is retarded? Well they should just tell her she won and her reward was a bag of Jolly Ranchers.
They could even put on a mock trial, sort of like in that episode of Futurama where they try t recreate the final episode of Single Female Lawyer.
“We declare the defendant spunky yet vulnerable!”
Perry, your language is indeed harsh but also totally dead-accurate. Humans seem almost biologically hard-wired to find a human-like “cause” for everything. In a way, it is a psychological prop to imagine that a doctor, or God, or Allah, or whatever, is at “fault” for our having been born with flat feet, or Down’s Syndrome, or a defective heart, etc, etc. To accept that life is a ticket in a huge lottery with massive odds is something that very few people, it seems, find it easy to grasp. It also I think explains why people find religion such a comfort.
Frivolous self interest or not, the question here is whether the doctor was negligent or not. Did the doctor say things like – ‘You’ll be fine, everything will be perfect, you have nothing to worry about’. I doubt it. I suspect the usual protocols were followed, and Ms Harriton has been unlucky. Bad luck does not deserve a large sum of money. Having children is inherently risky. And as an aside, IVF pregnancies are not lightly terminated by Mums-to-be – possibly, even if faced with a statement like ‘Your daughter could (and it’s almost always a could or might not a will) be born with some or many problems’, she may have elected to proceed regardless. I would be interested to attend some of the proceedings – I would like to give them both the benefit of the doubt.
Nick raises a very strong point: women who have IVF are women who are absolutely determined to have a baby, come hell or high water. They want a baby and they’re damn well going to have one. As he says, these women, once they’ve managed to get pregnant, don’t terminate lightly, especially as in the case where the doctor says, “There may be a risk …”.
So how mentally disabled is she if can supposedly look at her situation and reason her way to affixing responsibility in a manner that many people that we don’t consider mentally disabled would? This is exactly the thought I had when I read the post. It seems obvious to me that it is her mother who is behind this lawsuit. That is why I find Perry’s harshness misdirected.
Insensitive? Sorry but any expectation of sensitivity vanished the moment they decided to spread the misery around by including the hapless doctor. If the doctor did not follow accepted protocols (unless he had a good reason not to), then he may have been negligent in some measure (and I do not know if that is the case or not), but even then, as rubella does not guarantee the sort of massive horrors that seem to be manifest here, I find the idea of that the mother feels the doctor liable because she was not motivated enough to kill an unborn child as a ‘precautionary’ measure pretty nauseating.
The mere fact things turned out badly does not justify this action.
Taking a page from the playbook used by the anti-gun lawyers here in the USA, perhaps they should be suing the ‘test tube’ manufacturer. They probably have more money than the doctor…
Killing yourself, while no longer actually forbidded in much of the world, is made very, very difficult in advanced countries, that’s why not. It is much more difficult if you are physically handicapped, naturally.
The reason vets, doctors and farmers kill themselves more than other occupations in Britain is the availability of means not because their lot is intrinsically more miserable than say unemployed miners, accidental accountants or unattractive singers.
I’m not all that fond of my upper lip! Is there someone I can sue?
So here I am reading Samizdata for the first time, and thinking “hmm, this looks like an intelligent place to debate” and then I get to this entry and read some of the comments above, of which Robert’s is the shining example. If this is the vanguard of enlightened individualist thinking, it makes me reluctant to engage.
Robert, mental disability doesn’t always imply, as you put it, being “retarded”, nor is such bad luck i life fair cop for such crude stabs at humour, regardless of how inane you and I may think the legal action is. Alexia may be severely affected or not (do you know?), but mental disability can range from an inability to recognise that anyone else exists down to concentration impairment. No-one’s trying to stop your right to spout such vicious nonsense, but comments like yours and some of the others above, indeed the entry’s title itself, seem graceless and unblessed by the careful thought I thought I saw elsewhere here.
I don’t believe you forfeit the right to some human empathy, in proportion to misfortune, no matter how misguided your own attempts at impossible reparation for this are. But I suspect, as the muslim clerics cited above who could do with a good long-term dose of humour to acclimatise them, only a long-term dose of ill-fate could temper some of these humour-free and irrelevant side-swipes here.
And nick, I’m surprised you speak of the anti-immunisation lobby as “disgraceful”. One might have thought that a concern for personal liberty over state control may lead one to honour the freedom of others to dissent from state-imposed medical treatment over which there is (still) hot and worthy scientific debate, even if you happen to take one side in the argument and agree with the government that it’s all sewn up already.
Oh I agree that these hapless people deserve to be cut some slack given the dreadful situation they are in. However my empathy does not extend to them lashing out at the doctor. He also gets some of my empathy.
Quite so. There really *IS* a measurable risk from immunisation. Personally it is a risk I am willing to take as I think the preponderance of evidence suggests the risk of not immunising is the greater one, but that is my choice. However I have no truck with imposing it on people and although I do not agree with them, the arguments against are by no means preposterous.
Well I hope my post indicated I feel great empathy for the doctor, but empathy needn’t be rationed to one party, or at least treated as so forfeited that such misfortune as Alexia has stumbled upon should be treated with quite such little grace as some did above. That was really my point, as a new reader here.
Well said Mr. Havilland and precisely my thoughts when I first heard of this woman sueing for having been born.
Very well said.
Cheers,
Lloyd
Some of the comments on here show no shred of humanity whatsoever. We are talking about someone who is blind, deaf and brain-damaged, for God’s sake, and who is hardly in a position to ‘f*** off’ and ‘kill’ herself as Perry so *helpfully* advises. Whatever the arguments involved, the sheer nasty callousness of some of the comments in relation to a tragic situation is IMO a low point for this otherwise generally interesting and stimulating blog.
I stand by the comment that the anti-immunisation lobby are disgraceful. The balance of evidence shows that immunisation is safe, useful and cheap. I think it is a good point to make that the government should not compel people to be immunised. However, I would then expect to have the right to exclude unimmunised people (especially children) from communal areas, to minimise the risk of infection. I think groups that actively protest against immunisation are only able to do so because they profit from the herd immunity derived from those of us with sense enough to look at the evidence.
And another thing, Alexia is entitled to the same free health care as every other Australian. She doesn’t need to sue for it.