KALSRUHE, Germany, December 14, 2001 (LSN.ca) – A German Federal Court has rejected a lawsuit by couple demanding financial compensation from doctors for not warning them of their children’s handicaps while in utero. The British Medical Journal reports that parents of identical girl twins say that if doctors told them one of the twins was disabled they would have aborted the baby, who is now a child dependant on a wheelchair.
The judges ruled that an abortion of the handicapped twin would have been illegal because the procedure would have severely risked the life of the other twin. Only an extreme handicap and exceptional situation of the mother could have justified the abortion of one handicapped twin and the threatened death of the healthy one, they argued.
For more see the December 15 British Medical Journal at: https://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/323/7326/1388/f