Posted on 11/10/2003 9:42:34 PM PST by yonif
DENVER (AP) - Four men and four women were selected Monday to serve on a federal jury to decide whether a blind woman was denied fertility treatment because of her disability.
Kijuana Chambers said the Rocky Mountain Women's Health Care Center in Englewood performed three rounds of artificial insemination in 1999 but stopped the treatments when she refused to hire an occupational therapist to evaluate the safety of her home.
"They shouldn't have tried to stop me from living, and having children was a big part of my life," Chambers said outside the courtroom Monday.
Opening statements in the trial of a lawsuit against the clinic are scheduled for Wednesday, after the Veterans Day holiday. The trial is expected to last until Nov. 20.
Chris Miller, an attorney for the clinic, has said the case was not about the clinic's concerns over Chambers' blindness but about allegedly untrue statements she made.
He contends Chambers, 33, initially told the center she had a partner who could help care for the child but later acknowledged that she had no help.
Chambers said she was disappointed when the clinic told her she could not proceed.
"I was wishing to God that I could turn away my desire to have a child," she said. "Any woman who wants to have a child, married or single, makes a plan and knows what they need to do."
Chambers, who now lives in Iowa, found another clinic to do the procedure and gave birth to her daughter, Laurina, on Jan. 1, 2001.
Attorney Kevin Williams of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition said the case against the Englewood clinic was the first his group has seen in which a disability deprived a woman of artificial insemination.
The coalition sued the Rocky Mountain Women's Health Care Center on behalf of Chambers. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Denver, seeks unspecified monetary damages.
Fertility law expert Mark Rothstein, a professor at the University of Louisville Institute of Bioethics, Health and Law, said the incident could be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
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