Oregon couple sues Health Center for 'wrongful birth' after child born with Down syndrome

On the June 2007 day their daughter was born, Ariel and Deborah Levy were overcome with excitement, then shock when hospital staff told them their daughter looked like she had Down syndrome.

A doctor asked Deborah Levy if she’d had a prenatal test — a chorionic villus sampling, or CVS for short — and Levy said yes, the results showed they’d have a normal, healthy child.

Read it all.

Posted in * Culture-Watch, Children, Health & Medicine, Law & Legal Issues, Life Ethics, Marriage & Family

9 comments on “Oregon couple sues Health Center for 'wrongful birth' after child born with Down syndrome

  1. Br. Michael says:

    Personally this a “wrongful birth” suit should be prohibited on policy grounds, but in an “abortion, culture of death” centered society it makes prefect sense.

    Maybe they should seek the court to order a post birth abortion rather than money damages. that way no one is out of pocket? Sick suggestion? Yes, but then we live in a sick degenerate society.

  2. Archer_of_the_Forest says:

    Or they can just give the kid up for adoption. I know plenty of families that adopt down’s syndrome kids.

  3. Stefano says:

    THe embodiment of Chutzpah was once given as the man who kills his parents and throws himself on the courts mercy because he is an orphan. Here we have parents who demand money from the courts as justice because they failed to kill their child.

    [b]”I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live…”[/b]

  4. Vatican Watcher says:

    As a Christian and as someone who lives with a genetic disease of his own, I find these people’s selfishness to be repugnant.

    And practically speaking, if they were so intent on aborting a defective child, why did they not bother getting a second opinion after other tests showed the possibility of Down?

  5. Jim K says:

    Brother Michael; Please recall the article reported on last week from the two Oxford “philosophers” asserting that killing babies after they’re born is not ethically different from aborting them before they’re born. One would imagine that this couple would like to have exercised that “right” on their own child. And, if I recall the article correctly, the two geniuses declined to put a time limit on how long after birth the option to kill the child might extend. I believe, as do you, that abortion and infanticide are both parts of the same evil, the culture of death.

  6. DJH says:

    [url=http://www.hliamerica.org/truth-and-charity-forum/when-the-child-ordered-is-not-the-child-received/]This is actually a world-wide issue[/url]. Wrongful birth lawsuits sue on behalf of the parents and allege they should never have been forced to give birth to the disabled child. Wrongful life lawsuits sue on behalf of the child and claim that the child’s life is so horrendous it would have been better had he/she never been born. Both are repugnant. Both are the result of our culture losing the appreciation of the vocational nature of marriage and parenthood and viewing children as acquisitions for the benefit of the parents.

  7. Cennydd13 says:

    These parents should accept the fact that their daughter was born with Down’s Syndrome and let it go at that. It wasn’t the doctors’ fault, and I suspect that nothing could’ve been done to prevent it in the first place.

  8. Br. Michael says:

    Jim K, my comment had that article in mind.

  9. KevinBabb says:

    I know that our State government in Illinois has a bad reputation throughout the country, and very frequently this is deserved. However, as a citizen of Illinois, and a member of its Bar, I can at least point with pride to the fact that the Illinois Supreme Court long ago held that “wrongful birth” lawsuits were repugnant to the public policy of the State, and would not be countenanced in the courts of this State.

    Now if we could just stop electing Governors who end up going to jail…