Dude, you sound like my torts professor.

I feel a little better about this now that I think about it. She is going to be suing an abortion doctor, after all. I really could care less what happens to him/her in this. Its too bad any judgment will be paid via malpractice insurance.

Wouldn't a more appropriate analogy be a doctor surgically attaching an extra leg, as opposed to the amputation comparison? Instead of missing something that she can't replace, she gained something that she's elected to keep.

If she were suing for damages related to pain and suffering in terms of the pregnancy and birth, I could sort of see it. But no one is making her keep the kid that she intended to abort. To me that seem like an elected decision very unlike the amputation example.

It's just so weird: how could she and doctors that she visited not know she was 20 weeks pregnant?

If we're critiquing analogies, yours doesn't work simply because it doesn't make sense. Is attaching this extra leg an accident or was it intentional? Why is the person choosing to keep this 3rd leg instead of removing it?

Let's say she opts for adoption. Could she sue for emotional damage that having a child that won't know her can cause?

Oh, I know it doesn't make sense, but neither does giving birth to a child equate with amputating the wrong limb.

Although she was the victim of a botched medical procedure and a separate error in telling her she wasn't pregnant, she is now choosing to keep the child. An amputee cannot choose a course of action post surgery that basically allows him or her to return to the pre-surgery status.* She could have had she had the child and given it up.

*I think she is entitled to some compensation for the malpractice. I think that there were damages in having to carry the child she didn't want and give birth. But I don't think that the doctors should be responsible for the living expenses of the kid, seeing that she could avoid that obligation herself if she choose to give the child up.

It's kind hard for me to imagine why giving up the child for adoption would be psychologically more damaging than having aborted, especially more damaging in a way that would mean that she was entitled to ongoing compensation.

I disagree. Her analogy was about creating an additional problem. Furthermore I don't buy the comparison of gangrene or any other unfortunate condition to pregnancy, something a middle-aged American woman has had the means and knowledge to prevent for most of her life.

If she were suing for prenatal care and delivery costs, that'd be one thing. Maybe emotional distress. But in general you don't get compensated for the choices you make in life.

:(
 

How do you not perform an aportion correctly? Is the child damaged? How sad this all is...

HAHA that is the best thing anybody has ever said to me!

I know my analogy isn't exactly the same thing, but it's a bummer that people on this thread can't get past the emotional "OMG A BABY ISN'T A BAD THING" because for some people, it is and for some people, having an unwanted baby probably sucks just as much as having a leg amputated by accident (having never had a baby or an amputation, I can't speak from experience, but I'd be pretty upset to have either). In both cases, a doctor made a mistake and someone suffered unwanted consequences as a result. Why shouldn't some of the costs be transferred to the doctors? (I avoided the word "responsible" because my torts professor totally yelled at anybody who ever used that word.)

I can look at it both ways. As a law student it seems like she should have a claim. As a human being I feel entirely different.

Who said this?

There are ways to "get rid of" :( a baby - there's no way to get your leg back.

Her having to carry and give birth to a baby she didn't want probably was/seems to her a bad thing that she could/should be compensated for, but no one is insisting that she herself assume the cost of raising the kid. She is choosing to do that. She could easily transfer that cost to someone else through adoption.

(There's a big part of my that's with Shinerbock on this one. Go ahead, sue ALL the Planned Parenthood abortionists. Great plan.)

Well, and something else worth noting about the doctors' responsibility is that they didn't actually get her pregnant. She's got some baby's daddy out there that she can compel to pay child support.

Haha, my civ pro professor gets the same way when people use the word "guilty."

I think I'm agreeing with shinerbock on this; I mean, I'm pro-choice (although I have conflicting feelings on abortion, I don't think it's anyone's right to control someone's body), and as a law student I understand the rationale for damages (at least as well as a 1L can understand it), but this case still strikes me the wrong way. Of course, if things were decided on whether they struck someone "the wrong way," we'd have a messed up legal system.

I see where the woman would be entitled to some damages, but I wouldn't equate it to amputating the wrong leg, if only because you have all sorts of other health/morbidity concerns with that.

I honestly don't know what I would equate it with, only because I've never heard of anything like this before. I could see the mother/victim being entitled to something, I'm just not sure what that "something" would be. Have the physician or his insurance company pay for the costs associated with putting the baby up for adoption? Emotional and psychological damages? Did she suffer any lasting physical harm from the child birth?

Of course maybe it's best for her this happened in Massachusetts, where the court system doesn't mind going out on a limb.

Exactly!!

Could she sue for the emotional toll of post partum depression and/or the emotional toll of having a child in the world that she doesn't know? She didn't want a child, which is why she wanted an abortion, but having the child and sending it away is a potentially different dynamic.