Disabled child had a "right" to be aborted

Press review from 29th of November to 03rd of December 2010: The Brussels Court of Appeal ruled that a child, represented by his parents, could claim damages from physicians for the injury of being born disabled. 'Certainly, the misdiagnosis did not cause the child's disability, which existed before the error and which could not be remedied,' the Court considered. 'However, the injury which must be compensated is not the disability itself, but the fact of being born with such disabilities.'

For the Court, the child would have had 'right' to an abortion if the disability had been correctly diagnosed. Indeed, by making 'therapeutic abortion' part of Belgian law, 'the legislator must have intended to allow women to avoid giving birth to children with serious abnormalities, having regard not only to the interests of the mother, but also to those of the unborn child itself.' A similar judgment had been rendered on 21st April 2004 by the Brussels lower court for a Down’s Syndrome child.