Two weeks ago I told you about a New Zealand couple who won an appeals court ruling in their “wrongful birth” lawsuit. Shortly after publishing that story, a couple in Washington State was awarded $50 million, the state’s largest ever individual award, for a wrongful birth case.
Knowing that there was a 50-50 chance that their offspring would be born with a rare genetic disorder called “unbalanced chromosome translocation,” Brock and Rhea Wuth of Burien had their unborn child tested, but the hospital:
failed to include crucial data about where the lab was supposed to look for a chromosomal defect — essentially a genetic roadmap for where the defect would occur if at all.
Lab employees never followed up to ask for the crucial information, missed the translocation and came back with a negative result for the disorder.
When the couple’s child was born July 12, 2008, he was found to suffer from the disorder. The child, Oliver, now requires around-the-clock care. He has an IQ of between 50 and 70, cannot run or walk up stairs and can’t speak beyond two dozen or so words his parents can understand.
The Wuths’ lawyer, Todd Gardner, said the couple was “incredibly responsible” in seeking out the testing and had they been given the proper test results they would have terminated the pregnancy.
So, once again we have a couple publicly regretting the fact that they were not given the opportunity to kill their own child — a child they’ve been caring for for five years — and being rewarded for it!
Two weeks ago I told you about a New Zealand couple who won an appeals court ruling in their “wrongful birth” lawsuit. Shortly after publishing that story, a couple in Washington State was awarded $50 million, the state’s largest ever individual award, for a wrongful birth case.
Knowing that there was a 50-50 chance that their offspring would be born with a rare genetic disorder called “unbalanced chromosome translocation,” Brock and Rhea Wuth of Burien had their unborn child tested, but the hospital:
failed to include crucial data about where the lab was supposed to look for a chromosomal defect — essentially a genetic roadmap for where the defect would occur if at all.
Lab employees never followed up to ask for the crucial information, missed the translocation and came back with a negative result for the disorder.
When the couple’s child was born July 12, 2008, he was found to suffer from the disorder. The child, Oliver, now requires around-the-clock care. He has an IQ of between 50 and 70, cannot run or walk up stairs and can’t speak beyond two dozen or so words his parents can understand.
The Wuths’ lawyer, Todd Gardner, said the couple was “incredibly responsible” in seeking out the testing and had they been given the proper test results they would have terminated the pregnancy.
So, once again we have a couple publicly regretting the fact that they were not given the opportunity to kill their own child — a child they’ve been caring for for five years — and being rewarded for it!
On top of just making me sick to my stomach, these lawsuits give more fuel to obstetricians to continue bullying parents into abortion after a poor prenatal diagnosis.
Does our culture have a love/hate relationship with babies? Is Captain James T. Kirk captive to the culture of death? And what does Pope Francis mean by an “ecumenism of blood?”
That being said, I did find University of Leicester academic, Dr Chris Willmott’s insight into some aspects of the series quite interesting: