Court Opinion

ID: 9847556
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 04:02:14.805422+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:17:20.144419
License: Public Domain

RUSSELL, J.,
dissenting:
I would deny recovery in these cases because of the failure of the plaintiffs to prove that they have suffered compensable injuries. In the final paragraph of the majority opinion, the court notes the futility of requiring juries to weigh the burdens of parenthood against the joys and benefits arising from a child’s life. The majority opinion rejects the plaintiffs’ claims for damages for the expenses of rearing their children to maturity because a balance between the burdens and the offsetting benefits of parenthood could only be reached by speculation and conjecture. I fully agree.
Yet the majority, illogically it seems to me, permits recovery for medical expenses, pain, suffering, lost wages, and emotional distress arising from the defendant physicians’ failure to prevent the birth of healthy, normal children. Are these “injuries” not to be offset by the pleasures and benefits of parenthood? The thought that a balance exists between the burdens of childbirth and the joy of motherhood is hardly new.*
If there are benefits resulting to parents from the birth of healthy, normal children, as the majority evidently believes, why should the defendants not be entitled to an offset for such benefits against the plaintiffs’ claimed damages arising from childbirth, just as they would be entitled to offset them against the expense of rearing the children to maturity? The majority rejects the latter as too speculative and conjectural for the fact-finding process. Yet pain, suffering, and mental anguish, which the majority permits, are more subjective and less susceptible of precise calculation than *189the actual expenses of rearing children. In my view, damages for the claimed plaintiffs’ injuries resulting from the birth of healthy, normal children should be disallowed for the same reason the majority disallows damages for the expense of rearing children to maturity.
In Naccash v. Burger, 223 Va. 406, 290 S.E.2d 825 (1982), we applied traditional tort principles to a claim arising from the birth of a fatally afflicted child. There, the defendant’s negligence resulted in an occurrence which a jury could fairly compensate as a calamitous injury to the parents. But who is to say whether, in the long run, the birth of a healthy, normal child is a disaster or a blessing?
It is fundamental to tort law that no breach of duty, however egregious, is actionable unless it is the proximate cause of an injury to the plaintiff. Who is to say if these plaintiffs have suffered an injury, and if so, to what degree? How many years must pass before the answer can be determined? Accordingly, I would reverse Miller v. Johnson and affirm Hwang v. Ruth, entering final judgments for the defendants in both cases.

 “A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she delivereth the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.” John 16:21.