Court Opinion

ID: 9746639
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:31:01.66069+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:15.640889
License: Public Domain

Douglas, J.,
dissenting: Relying on dictum in Poliquin v. MacDonald, 101 N.H. 104, 135 A.2d 249 (1957), the defendant claims that the plaintiff must prove that the boy’s life had progressed to the stage of viability at the time of the accident in order to maintain the action. In Poliquin, we decided that if a fetus was viable at the time of the accident and was thereafter stillborn, a death action would lie under RSA 556:7, 9-14.
“We are ... of the opinion that a fetus having reached that period of pre-natal maturity where it is capable of independent life apart from its mother is a person and if such child dies in the womb as the result of another’s negligence, an action for recovery may be maintained in its behalf.” (Emphasis added.)
101 N.H. at 107, 135 A.2d at 251. The court stated, however, that “if a fetus is non-viable at the time of injury and dies in the womb its representative can maintain no action.” Id.
In Bennett v. Hymers, 101 N.H. 483, 147 A.2d 108 (1958), we held that a child born alive could maintain an action for injuries received before birth without regard to viability at the time of the injury. In that context, viability at the time of injury was *681irrelevant because the person was presently suffering from the pre-natal injuries. The plaintiff asserts that because both nonviable and viable fetuses have causes of action following live birth for injuries prior thereto, there should be no distinction based on viability governing the applicability of RSA 556:12 in cases where the child is stillborn and thus asks us to repudiate the dictum in Poliquin supra.
“The common law has always been most solicitous for the welfare of the fetus in connection with its inheritance rights as well as protecting it under the criminal law.” Poliquin, supra at 107, 135 A.2d at 251. The property rights of the later born child are as old as the common law itself. Blackstone has stated:
“An infant in [sic] ventre sa mere, or in the mother’s womb, is supposed in law to be born for many purposes. It is capable of having a legacy, or a surrender of a copyhold estate, made to it. It may have a guardian assigned to it; and it is enabled to have an estate limited to its use, and to take afterwards by such limitation, as if it were then actually born. And in this point the civil law agrees with ours.”
W. Blackstone, Commentaries* 130. See, e.g., Wallis v. Hodson, 26 Eng. Rep. 472 (Ch. 1740); Marsh v. Kirby, 21 Eng. Rep. 512 (Ch. 1634); and RSA 551:10.
As this court noted in Bennett:
“. . . we find it difficult to see the logic which would recognize a child’s legal existence while en ventre sa mere with respect to property rights and rights of inheritance (4 Tiffany, Real Property (3d ed.) s. 1127, p. 391) and also in the field of criminal law . . . and yet would deny it recognition so as to afford it protection against the torts of others.”
101 N.H. at 485,147 A.2d at 110.
That illogic in the field of torts was especially noted in the common-law theory that if a person was injured and died due to the injury, his “case died with him.” Thus, if negligent acts were committed against someone’s person so as to break his arm he could recover from the tortfeasor, but if the tortfeasor killed the plaintiff, he was “home free.” No one ever asserted that adults were not “persons” because they had to survive the injury to sue. The illogic of the tort rule led to the passage of “wrongful death” *682or “survivor” acts, such as the act at issue in this case, RSA 556:12. See Hebert v. Hebert, 120 N.H. 369, 415 A.2d 679 (1980).
The majority asserts that a cause of action for an aborted child “benefits only the parents.” That principle also is valid if applied to the death of a fourteen-year-old child or an elderly person with no living relatives. Our legislature has recognized that human life should not be wrongfully taken and that everyone is worth “something.” See RSA 556:13.
In Poliquin this court chronicled the tort law evolution leading up to the holding in that case that turned on the viable/nonviable distinction for stillborn infants. At common law, most distinctions, especially with regard to homicide, related to whether the child in the womb was “quick.” That old English word separated humanity into “the quick and the dead.” See The Oxford Universal Dictionary 1640 (3d ed. rev. 1955). With regard to the carrying of a child in the womb, “quickening” is subjective and merely means that the mother feels the child moving within her. It varies from mother to mother but will usually range from three to five months. See authorities cited in Byrn, Abortion-on-Demand: Whose Morality? 46 Notre Dame Lawyer 5, 9-12 (1970) (hereinafter Byrn). The seventeenth century medical technology did not allow for a more sophisticated segmenting especially in the criminal law abortion-murder statutes. Id. at 10-11.
“Viability”, on the other hand, is what medical science in the last century established ás the stage of life when an infant was said to be capable of existence apart from its mother. See Woods v. Lancet, 303 N.Y. 349, 357, 102 N.E.2d 691, 695 (1951). The trouble with this as a guidepost is that it turns upon the ever-changing progress in the field of medical science. Indeed, ten years ago it was noted that with “recent advances in technology, viability has been pushed back from the twenty-eighth to the twentieth week of pregnancy.” Byrn, supra at 12. As one observer put it:
“In this day of DNA synthesis, test-tube incubation, intrauterine transfusions, talk in high circles of chromosomal manipulation and in vitro generation, the 20-week survivability standard is about as sacred as the four-minute mile.” Byrn, supra at 13, quoting Diamond, Humanizing the Abortion Debate, America, July 19, 1969, at 36-37.
Within this last year of “test-tube” babies and “cloning”, the United States Supreme Court has even dealt with the esoteric question of whether a live human-made micro-organism is *683patentable. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 100 S. Ct. 2204 (1980).
Several years ago, Dean Prosser pointed out that medical authority has long recognized that a child is in existence from the “moment of conception” and that “the unborn child in the path of an automobile is as much a person in the street as the mother.” W. Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts 336 (4th ed. 1971). Accord 42 Am. Jur. 2d Infants § 2 (1969). This court, twenty-two years ago in Bennett, clearly said:
“We adopt the opinion that the fetus from the time of conception becomes a separate organism and remains so throughout its life.”
101 N.H. at 485, 147 A.2d at 110. That conclusion is even more valid today.
“The unborn child is not a part of the mother. The organs and the blood of the child are his own, and at six weeks the features of his face — a human face — are discernible. Even the belief that the placenta was part of the mother has been proven to be false. The child is ‘neither a quiescent vegetable nor a witless tadpole, as some have conceived him to be in the past, but rather a tiny human being, independent as though he were lying in a crib with a blanket wrapped around him instead of his mother.’ ‘The fertilized egg . . . grows and develops into an embryo, a fetus, an infant, a youngster, an adolescent, an adult, an oldster, and, finally a cadaver.’ ‘Birth is not a beginning. ... It is more nearly a bridge between two stages of life.’ It is as irrational to choose birth, quickening, or viability as the point at which life is to be legally protected as it is to choose the age of six months, seven years, or the age of adult majority as the Roman law essentially did.” Note, The Law and the Unborn Child: The Legal and Logical Inconsistencies, 46 NOTRE Dame Lawyer 349, 371 (1971) [hereinafter The Law and the Unborn Child,].
The law has progressed far since the time when children could even intentionally be killed by their parents. Infanticide was made a crime for the first time in Rome in 318 A.D. Id. at 371 n.163. See RSA 639:5. Today, at least sixteen states recognize that a civil cause of action may exist for either the father or the mother when a child is stillborn, because it is a “person.” See The Law and the Unborn Child at 359 n.76 and cases cited therein.
*684The majority concludes that by “death” of a “person” in RSA ch. 556 the legislature did not contemplate children in the status of a fetus. It has, however, been a long twenty-two years since we held in Poliquin that, for purposes of RSA ch. 556, viable fetuses are “persons” even if stillborn. Today we should discard our legislatively undisturbed and judicially-created “viability” distinction in Poliquin. See Presley v. Newport Hospital, 117 R.I. 177, 365 A.2d 748 (1976).
“The courts seem to be moving toward granting recovery where a non-viable child is injured and subsequently is born dead. This is the ‘last frontier’ for the unborn child in the law of tort recovery. . . . The purpose of wrongful death statutes is to protect human life, and they will not be completely effective until an action can be maintained for the wrongful taking of any life no matter how young or how old.” Hartye, Tort Recovery for the Unborn Child, 15 Journal of Family Law 276,299 (1976-1977).
I am aware that the United States Supreme Court in one area of the law has chosen to impose upon the states a controversial judicial edifice based upon the so-called “viability” and trimester model (a model that may rapidly become scientifically untenable). In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, reh’g denied, 410 U.S. 959 (1973), a majority of that Court chose to speak only of “potential” life and said a state’s important interest in the intentional abortion field only reaches the “compelling” point at the second, or “viability,” stage. Id. at 161-63. As that Court noted in Roe, “[viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks.” Id. at 160. Yet recently, the Court placed “viability” as “usually in the third trimester.” See Harris v. McRae, 100 S. Ct. 2671, 2686 (1980) (upholding the Hyde Amendment). We should not segment life into “trimesters” any more than into changing or transient demarcations based upon “viability” or “quickening.”
In whatever manner the United States Supreme Court chooses to define “persons” for fourteenth amendment purposes, it is not binding on this court with regard to RSA ch. 556 death actions. We have clearly opted as a state for “the opinion that the fetus from the time of conception becomes a separate organism and remains so throughout its life.” Bennett, supra at 485, 147 A.2d at 110. The majority unsuccessfully tries to dance around that earlier decision of this court by saying on one hand “the law will not extend civil liability for negligence to . . . [the child] by giving it a *685cause of action until it becomes a “person” by “being born alive” while at the same time not overruling Poliquin or the Bennett language. Even at eight weeks the unborn child
“has a pumping heart with fully deployed blood vessels and has all other internal organs. The face is completely formed, and the arms, legs, hands, feet, toes and fingers are partially formed. The fetus will react to tickling of the mouth or nose, and there is readable electrical activity coming from the brain (citations omitted).”
Byrn, supra at 8. If death is defined as the irreversible cessation of spontaneous heart and circulatory pulsation in a person, Halley & Harvey, Medical v. Legal Definitions of Death, 204 J. Am. Meb. A. 428 (1968), we had life in the case of Baby Boy Wallace.
I recognize, as we did in Bennett,
“that the problem of proving causal connection between the injury and the accident increases as injury occurs earlier in gestation. However difficulty of proof should not bar recovery for a wrong if the evidence meets the usual tests required in tort cases.”
101 N.H. at 486, 147 A.2d at 110.
For purposes of RSA ch. 556, I would join the Rhode Island Supreme Court in concluding that life is life and people are people by discarding the outmoded and improper “viability” distinction. See Presley v. Newport Hospital supra.