Wrongful Birth

This 2006 article,"A Wrongful Birth," discusses the cases of individual families (as well as of the author herself) in which, due to the existence or possibility of disabilities, the families wished to abort their child. Because their pre-natal medical care did not (and, they claim, should have) identified the possibility or existence of these disabilities, they sued the doctor/hospital for wrongful birth:

"At present, courts in about half the states recognize wrongful birth as a subset of medical negligence or allow lawsuits under the more general malpractice umbrella if a doctor's poor care leads to the delivery of a child the parents claim they would have chosen to terminate in utero had they known in time of its impaired health."

The essay as a whole is very thoughtful, and takes into account different perspectives, although it comes down on a side with which I disagree. The ending is frustrating:

"The Brancas love the son they wish they hadn't had. My family continues to mourn the child we don't regret terminating. 'Anything you might say about the wrongfulness or the rightness of a birth,' Laurie Zoloth, the bioethicist, says, 'the particularity of that choice is only, and always, experienced by a particular set of parents in a particular family with certain grandparents, certain aunts and uncles, in a certain religion on a certain block in a certain neighborhood. These are circumstances that as professionals, and certainly as bioethicists, it's nearly impossible to fully understand. And then, of course, we have the luxury of walking away.'"

Certainly the bioethicist quoted here is right--these decisions are made in a particular context and the context heavily influences the situation. However, the ending implies two things: 1) that the ethical issues finally cannot be spoken to outside of the particular situation; 2) any universal ethical pronouncements on this topic would be hard-hearted because ethicists can't fully understand what the parents are facing. Therefore, whatever choice the parents make is the right one, so we shouldn't judge.

This annoys me because in some areas, we clearly need to be able to make universal ethical judgments. Just one example is murder--granted, many other considerations come into play with regard to murder. Some people might have persuasive reasons for doing it. But we can (and must!) still judge at the end of the day.