Court Opinion

ID: 9754527
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:03:05.764833+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:54.366883
License: Public Domain

*21LARSEN, Justice,
dissenting.
I dissent. The majority holds that a child born with a hereditary disease may not recover, in his own right, against medical doctors who treated his parents prior to his birth, on three grounds: (1) damages are too speculative to determine; and (2) the child has no “legal” injury since the hereditary disease was not caused by another but by natural processes. I believe that neither of these grounds has merit.
With respect to the majority’s conclusion that the child in this case cannot recover because damages are too speculative to determine, it is well-settled that
[difficulties which may be encountered in precisely ascertaining damages cannot, in the interests of justice, deter recognition of a cause of action. As the United States Supreme Court has stated:
Where the tort itself is of such a nature as to preclude the ascertainment of the amount of damages with certainty, it would be a perversion of fundamental principles of justice to deny all relief to the injured person, and thereby relieve the wrongdoer from making any amends for his acts. In such case, while the damages may not be determined by mere speculation or guess, it will be enough if the evidence show that extent of the damages as a matter of just and reasonable inference, although the result be only approximate. The wrongdoer is not entitled to complain that they cannot be measured with the exactness and precision that would be possible if the case, which he alone is responsible for making, were otherwise.
*22Story Parchment Co. v. Paterson P. Paper Co., 282 U.S. 555, 563, 51 S.Ct. 248, 250, 75 L.Ed. 544 (1931).
Speck v. Finegold, 497 Pa. 77, 93 n. 5, 439 A.2d 110, 118 n. 5 (1981) (Opinion by Kauffman, J.) (additional citations omitted).
The majority also concludes that the child’s injury in this case is not a “legal injury” because his disease was not caused by the doctors but by “natural processes.” 1 Maj. Opinion at 1329. The child in this case, however, is not claiming that the doctors “caused his disease.” Rather, his cause of action is based on the doctors’ negligence in failing to inform his parents that there was a high probability that any child they had would suffer from neurofibromatosis, and his resulting life burdened with suffering and an exceptional need for medical and other assistance. “Any argument that this life of suffering is not the natural and probable consequence of [the doctors’] misconduct is rank sophistry.” Id., 497 Pa. at 92, 439 A.2d 118.
Where a child experiences suffering and financial expense as a result of another’s negligence, that suffering and expense should be recompensed. As Justice Flaherty stated in Speck v. Finegold, supra:
Those holding such views [that recovery must be defeated in all cases of this type] are apparently able to overlook what is plain to see: that — in cases such as this — a diseased plaintiff exists and, taking the allegations of the complaint as true, would not exist at all but for the negligence of the defendants. Existence in itself can hardly be characterized as an injury, but when existence is foreseeably and inextricably coupled with a disease, such existence, depending upon the nature of the disease, may be intolerably burdensome. To judicially foreclose consideration of whether life in a particular case is such a burden would be to tell the diseased, possibly deformed plaintiff that he can seek no remedy in the courts and to imply that his alternative remedy, in the extreme event *23that he finds his life unduly burdensome, is suicide. No court in the land would directly send such a message to these plaintiffs.
Id., 497 Pa. at 87, 439 A.2d at 115. It is unfortunate indeed that the majority of this Court is now sending that message.
The order of the Superior Court should be reversed.

. According to the majority, the child’s disease is to be accepted as "simply part of life." Maj. Opinion at 20.