Wrongful Life Case Study

Paragraph 3 – Against Wrongful life should not be recognised as a compensable tort in Australia. The High Court has been wary of making decisions about what kind of actions are compensatable since the case of Distillers Co. (Biochemicals) Ltd v Thompson (Laura Anne) [1971] which was a case arising due to the effects of thalidomide. In recent years the case of Harriton v Stephens [2006], has been the benchmark for decisions of wrongful life. In this case there was a claim for wrongful life by a disabled child who claimed they would have been better off not to be born, than to be born with their severe disabilities. The decision by the court was that the claim for wrongful life should be rejected, it was suggested by Crennan J that ‘Cattanach …show more content…
This conclusion is supported by the majority judgements in the cases of Harriton v Stephens and Waller v James, Waller v Hoolahan. These judgments suggest that the claim that the disability of the child is worse than if they had never existed, I agree with Crennan J when it was suggested that ‘it is odious and repugnant to devalue the life of a disabled person by suggesting that such a person would have been better off not to be born’. All life is of equal importance and it is wrong to suggest that anyone would have been better off had they not been born or existed at all. There is also the problem that the courts face in the impossibility of quantifying the amount of damages required for someone who believes that they would have been better off in non existence. It was argued that ‘there is no present field of human learning including philosophy and theology which would allow a person experiential access to no existence, it cannot be compared with the life of disabilities led by Miss Harriton’. Therefore, this suggests that even though the plaintiff may believe that they would have been better had they not existed; there is no possible way for the courts to quantify the value of non existence. Although there are valid arguments put forward in favour of the recognition of wrongful life as a compensable tort, such as the arguments put forward by Kirby J in Harriton v Stephens that it gives immunity to healthcare providers to not recognise it as a compensable tort, providing them with a loophole to get out of their liability. They do have a duty of care to the parents of the child in their care, but do not owe that duty of care to the unborn child. There is no way to prove that there is a duty of care to the unborn child, and thus claims for wrongful life have problems with being recognised by