NY: infant has no claim for 'wrongful birth': mother entitled to amend claim for malpractice.
CASE FACTS: Ayritha Sample brought suit for medical malpractice, alleging, inter alia, that her daughter was born with severe birth defects and disabilities as a result of the defendants' failure to diagnose and treat her own preexisting medical conditions. The defendants moved, inter alia, to dismiss the suit insofar...

French Court Extends "Wrongful Birth" Ruling to Down Syndrome.
Broadening an earlier decision that awarded damages for the birth of a disabled child, France's highest court ruled November 28 that a doctor should be held responsible for neglecting to diagnose an unborn baby's Down syndrome. The Cour de Cassation held that the mother should have had the opportunity...

"Wrongful-Birth" Lawsuits Abolished in Georgia and In Michigan.
Courts in Michigan and Georgia have rejected attempts by parents of disabled children to sue doctors who, the parents claimed, failed to discover their babies' birth defects in time for an abortion. The Michigan Court of Appeals and the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that these "wrongful-birth" lawsuits...

Pharmacists and the "duty" to dispense emergency contraceptives.
ABSTRACT: Stories abound of both women with prescriptions turned away at the pharmacy door and members of the most trusted health care profession losing jobs and running afoul of ethics rules. Scholars have spilt much intellectual ink divining whether a pharmacist must dispense Plan B, the primary emergency contraceptive....

Willis v. Wu in the Supreme Court of South Carolina *.
HELD: South Carolina does not recognize a common law cause of action for wrongful life brought by or on behalf of a child born with a congenital defect because it is impossible to prove that being terminated by elective abortion, and thus never being born, is better than being...

Overcoming the obstacles: a collaborative approach to informed consent in prenatal genetic screening.
"The social distance built into current ways of looking at the human body--the view of an objective scientist looking at another bodily object that is clearly separate and distinct--will be expanded to include a new type of social connectedness, where two human beings will be able to share their...

French Court Awards Damages for "Wrongful Birth".
Controversy continues to swirl over the decision of France's highest court that a child born with severe handicaps can sue for the "damages" he suffered by being born rather than aborted. One critic of the decision said, "This is the first time that doctors have been condemned...

Job in Court.
While the bioethics disputes that reach the courts frequently raise issues that are novel and perplexing, the problems are seldom truly philosophical. One exception are the so-called "wrongful life" cases brought against health care professionals by children whose parents were misinformed about the children's medical problems at a time...

LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
LONG-TERM CARE FOR PEOPLE WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES Provision of long-term care for people with developmental disabilities is a challenge, especially considering the increased longevity of this population and the questionable quality of existing community-based care. However, a renewed focus on institutionalization, as suggested by Palley and Van...

Cold comfort pharmacy: pharmacist tort liability for conscientious refusals to dispense emergency contraception.
Kristen Marttila Gast, Cold Comfort Pharmacy: Pharmacist Tort Liability for Conscientious Refusals to Dispense Emergency Contraception, 16 TEX. J. WOMEN & L. 149 (2007). Pharmacists on the whole are adamant that they have the ethical and legal right to refuse to dispense medications they find objectionable. Whether...