An Italian woman filed a lawsuit against the San Paolo hospital in Milan recently because her child is alive.
The woman, who is not named in reports, had an abortion at the hospital in April 2013, but it failed to kill her unborn baby and she later gave birth to a healthy infant, Newsline reports.
Now, she wants the hospital to pay her €211,000 (about $240,000), plus a monthly stipend because her unborn baby did not die.
The woman, 37, said she is a single mother of three. She said she had the abortion because she was afraid the child’s father would not support her; she also is disabled and struggles with Crohn’s disease. |
Here’s more from the report:
She was told that the procedure went as planned. However, when she returned a month later, tests showed that the fetus remained inside her and was told that only a surgical abortion was available.
“It’s medical malpractice,” Vincenzo Lepre, her lawyer told the Local. “It’s simply not acceptable for a patient to go to hospital, have an abortion, be told that everything is OK, and then a month later find out that they are still pregnant.”
Despite fears that her chronic inflammatory illness would endanger her life and that of the fetus, the mother nonetheless turned down the surgical intervention and gave birth to a healthy child in December 2013.
The woman’s lawyers said she is struggling more financially now that she has her third child. They said her health condition is worse and she is unemployed.
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“Of course, she loves her child and is happy in that sense, but it’s tough; this is a woman who already had health problems and financial problems, and for a child you have to make a lot of sacrifices … ” her lawyer, Valentina Valente, told The Local.
Her lawsuit is in a similar spirit to wrongful birth lawsuits in the United States, where families have won millions of dollars in settlements. In wrongful birth cases, the families argue that they would have aborted their unborn baby if they had known that the baby had a disability or ailment. They argue that their medical provider neglected to tell them important information that would have led them to abort their unborn baby.
For example, in 2013, a Washington state couple won $50 million in a lawsuit after they argued they were denied information that could have led them to abort their disabled baby, LifeNews reported. The Seattle Times reported the couple knew based on their family medical history they were at a 50-50 chance of having children suffering from a rare but debilitating genetic disorder called “unbalanced chromosome translocation,” but a genetic test failed to detect the disorder in their unborn baby.
In 2014, an Illinois mother also sued her doctor, claiming that he botched her tubal ligation and it led to the birth of her daughter who has sickle cell disease.
In most cases, the parent say they love their child; but they also admit that they would have had them aborted because of an imperfect situation or imperfect health. A child’s personal qualities, their health and their family environment do not make them any more or less valuable. Children, born and unborn, are valuable because they are unique human beings. But these types of lawsuits devalue their lives, and all human lives, by treating some children as if they were better off dead.
