Posted on 12/26/2011 2:13:44 PM PST by wagglebee
December 23, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A law court in Belgium has ordered a gynecologist to pay damages to the parents of a handicapped girl for not having told them she would probably be born with spina bifida in time for them to choose to have an abortion.
Each parent is to receive 50,000 euro compensation (over $65,000 US each) from the gynecologist who the court said “should have” spotted the heavy risk that the baby would be affected by the condition during tests made at 15 weeks pregnancy. The court of appeal of Gent confirmed the earlier judgment of Kortrijk tribunal which decided the gynecolocist had committed a “fault.”
The little girl is now 9 years old, and besides her spina bifida, which keeps her to her wheelchair, she is also incontinent and mentally handicapped.
During the pregnancy the doctor being sued had reportedly referred the couple to a colleague at the Kortrijk hospital. When this doctor informed the parents that the child they were expecting would suffer from a serious form of spina bifida, the pregnancy was already 33 weeks along, “too late” for an abortion.
Two years after the girl’s birth her parents decided to take legal action against the first doctor, who unsuccessfully tried to shift the case over to his hospital colleague, arguing that he should have recommended abortion to the parents when he informed them at 33 weeks.
Neither the tribunal nor the court of appeal accepted this line of defense; instead, the damages awarded to the parents were doubled by the appeals court.
The likely immediate effect of the judges’ decision is that Belgian doctors will be pressed to make doubly sure that the unborn child is free from all “defects,” and to recommend abortion when it is not.
The case also reveals a lack of clarity of Belgian abortion law, which is implemented differently from one region and even from one hospital to another.
Abortion is legal in Belgium up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Beyond that term, it is permitted when the unborn child has a grave and incurable condition, or when the pregnancy is endangering the life of the mother. The law has no fixed deadline and in theory the abortion can take place at any time before birth.
The couple’s legal counsel, Thierry Vansweevelt, who is also professor of Medical Law at the University of Antwerpen, called Thursday’s decision by the court of appeal “important.”
“The judge decided that the situation is unclear for everyone, including the hospital gynecologist whom we are told should have advised the woman (to abort). For doctors as well as for pregnant women there should be certainty about whether abortion is possible up to the day before birth,” he commented.
Vansweevelt also recommended that the National Abortion Commission which registers all abortions in Belgium should keep count of all “birth terminations” taking place after 24 weeks: “That would at least allow us to know how important that group is. At this point the Commission only asks whether the abortion took place before or after 12 weeks,” he said.
This means that the Belgian decision to compensate a couple for the birth of a seriously handicapped child could end up causing even more dire consequences for that country. While at present some hospitals are submitting all abortions beyond 12 weeks pregnancy to “ethical” commissions, others doing so only beyond the viability limit, a “clarification” of the law would probably widen the scope of abortion without question when serious conditions are diagnosed, and could scrap the time limit altogether, bringing Belgium in line with its Dutch and French neighbors.
I suspect the real change due to this decision will be doctors abandoning obstetrics. I have an acquaintance whose husband did just that when similar decisions started being made in this country. She told me a lot of OB/GYNs became GYN only.
You’re failing to note that at least Belgium has a gestation limit to when abortions can be performed. We are one of the few countries that de facto (Doe vs. Bolton) has NO limit to when abortions can be performed.
And, indeed, as records and the odd criminal case has shown, unwanted babies have been simply left out to die in a closet.
Yes, if the parents hated the child, I’m pretty sure they had options.
Thank you! Nice to be here :)
I’ll raise a glass of Mountain Dew for you (I’m a teatoataler by choice). Cheers and Praise God!
Following your rationale, many reading this thread would not be alive if it were not for medical interventions that were not in use 50 or 100 or 500 years ago.
Should we all die, then? I’d have to be one that died, probably several times already. Many of us are “alive artificially after medical intervention”!!!!!
“I was not quite five pounds and born three months premature....”
You were a big preemie. I was less than 4 1/2 pounds at birth, and I was a five-week preemie.
For almost all of human history up to about 50-100 years ago the girl would have died shortly after birth with deformities that serious. Is that God’s will? Or is it that the child should be alive artificially after medical intervention?
Let's see, for almost all of history (until the last century or so), many of us would have died much earlier but for advances in modern medicine.
Do you or any member of your family take medicine for high blood pressure?
Any diabetics among you?
What about antibiotics, have you ever used them?
Has anyone you know ever had an appendicitis or any other surgery?
How about a heart attack? Anyone you know survive one of them? Bypass surgery?
I think you will find that just about all of us regularly benefit from medical advances that didn't exist a century ago.
Would the parents have gone on to have other children if this one did pass shortly after birth? What are those lives worth?
So, you would trade an ACTUAL LIFE for a hypothetical one?
Disgusting.
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Great idea. Do you think that God is pro-life?
I weighed five and a half pounds and my elder sister weighed five pounds. These days babies of much lesser weight live and thrive. If the medical profession had accepted the reality of the time, that wouldn’t ever have happened. The fight for life takes many forms.
mr brother was born with sp bifada and my parents raised him like they raised us which is the best way to do it. He learned how to ride a bike, ski, etc and hold mutilple degrees. The Drs told my parents to put him in a home when he was born- unreal.
That is the most relativistic & immature comment I’ve read in awhile.
Thanks for wasting my time. That was 30 seconds of my life I’ll never get back.
God bless you!
What are you blathering about? God made man intelligent enough to discover new medical treatments for people born with disabilities. Medicine has evolved over time to help many people with illnesses they wouldn’t have survived years ago.
“Would the parents have gone on to have other children if this one did pass shortly after birth? What are those lives worth?”
What you really mean to say is would the parents have had “normal” children, right? The “normal” children deserved a chance at a life rather than the “disabled” one, right? The parents wouldn’t have aborted a “normal” child. So the true victims in this whole mess are the parents and the unborn “normal” children they didn’t have. Give me a break.
To which murders of innocent pre-born babies would you willfully mis-apply the phrase “God’s will”?
Here we go folks. Remember how the perverted bunch has said that being a queer/freak/pervert can be traced back to a specific genetic defect. Will the Euros mandate abortion because of this genetic defect?
More like “Gattaca.”
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