PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Legal Newsline) - A 2022 ruling has doomed a Rhode Island couple's lawsuit that claimed they never would have conceived their second and third kids had they known they were at a risk for cystic fibrosis.
The state Supreme Court on Aug. 20 rejected wrongful life and wrongful conception claims by Jason and Heather Blouin, who sued a variety of medical care providers over children born in 2009 and 2012.
Their suit was filed in 2015 and lasted long enough for the state Supreme Court to take up the viability of claims like theirs in May 2022, when it registered its opinion in a case known as Ho-Rath III.
In that case, Jean and Bunsan Ho-Rath sued over their daughter's blood disorder. Ultimately, daughter Yendee ended up the plaintiff against Corning and Quest Diagnostics and her claims were characterized as for wrongful life.
The defendants said Yendee's argument was essentially that her parents would have aborted her as a fetus had they known she would be born with Hemoglobin H Constant Spring Disease.
The court recognized other jurisdictions that had rejected wrongful life claims, like the Oregon Supreme Court in 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 2010.
"(I)t is impossible for us to determine whether Yendee has suffered an injury in being born impaired, rather than not being born at all," the Rhode Island court ruled.
"Yendee alleges that her birth is the result of defendants' negligence, and but for the allegedly negligent conduct she would not have been born at all."
Though Yendee must undergo regular blood transfusions and has a shorter life expectancy, she testified she was happy to be alive and graduated high school with a 4.0 grade point average before moving on to the University of Vermont.
"Absent clear legislative guidance to the contrary, we are persuaded by the overwhelming majority of opinions that refuse to recognize life, even a life with severe impairments or illnesses, as an injury in the legal sense," the court ruled then.
By 2024, nothing had changed in the law when the Blouins' case. Justice Melissa Long authored the opinion rejecting their claims after not participating in Ho-Rath III.
"The claims brought by X.B. and D.B. (the Blouins' children) are no different from the claim brought by the plaintiff in Ho-Rath III," Long wrote.
"The temporal difference that the plaintiffs highlight - the amount of time that elapsed between the alleged inaction on the part of the defendants and when the existence of X.B. and D.B. as fetuses was known - does not alter our determination that Ho-Rath III controls the outcome in the instant case."
The Blouins' claims essentially say they weren't offered genetic screening or other testing that would smoke out risks in their genes they could pass to their children. Also, X.B., born in 2009, was not diagnosed with cystic fibrosis until 2013, the year after D.B. was born.