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The concept of wrongful life in the law.


 In the history of the law the concept of wrongful life is not new, but it has become of interest recently due to changing social attitudes and advances in contraceptive and genetic technologies. This discussion tries to assess the effects of wrongful life as a legal concept on the rights of childbearing women and their offspring. An unborn child had no rights under common law, which held that a fetus in utero had no existence separate from its mother. Consequently, a child had no right of action for personal harm brought upon it by another person. On occasion early courts disagreed with this view, but the majority of courts maintained that a child had no existence as a human being during gestation. The effect that this concept of common law would have on current abortion laws would be to make it considerably easier to argue for a woman's right to choose an abortion. The notion of wrongful life initially appeared in cases of illegitimate births. In Zepeda v. Zepeda, 1963, and Williams v. State of New York, 1966, the plaintiffs maintained that the children's births and existence were wrongful because they were unintended and illegitimate. In Williams the court ruled that birth under 1 set of circumstances and not another is not a recoverable injury. These cases failed to meet the requirements of tort law, and the court rejected the notion of children finding legal recourse for being born to a poor family or being born to a less desired race or class. A series of cases followed in which recovery for physical injury or birth deformities were claimed by parents for themselves and their children. In June 1980 a California appeals court reversed the decision of a lower court, addressing the fundamental principles of wrongful life as a legal concept. In Curlender v. Bio-Science Laboratories an infant brought suit alleging that the laboratories failed to correctly inform her parents of their status as carriers of Tay-Sachs disease during the mother's pregnancy. The infant was born with Tay-Sachs. This was the 1st case in which a court established that a child has a cause of action, separate from its parents, for a claim of wrongful life. In recognizing the child as an independent plaintiff the court established the child's right to allege that its life is wrongful, i.e., it should never have been born. The court in Curlender affirmed that the child's life, on its own, is of legitimate concern to the courts. A most forceful social issue raised here is the concept of quality of life and whether or not a life is worth living if burdened by debilitating injury. The court did not address the problems inherent in measuring quality of life from individual to individual, nor did it decide how a child must show injury to warrant recovery in court. The Curlender decision referred to the Roe v. Wade decision as a woman's legal right not to have a child, and by inference, as a child's legal right to be free of damage. By extension, Roe v. Wade could be interpreted as a legal right not to be born.
