Court Opinion

ID: 9746814
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 14:39:11.458737+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:17.228811
License: Public Domain

SPAETH, Judge,
concurring and dissenting:
I agree with the opinion of the majority except in one respect. For the reasons stated in my concurring and dissenting opinions in Speck v. Finegold, 268 Pa.Super. 342, 408 A.2d 496 (1979), and Stribling v. deQuevedo,-Pa.Super. -, 432 A.2d 239 (1980), I believe that the mother should be permitted to recover (if she can prove) damages for emotional distress attributable to the birth and rearing of her child. I see no reason to change my position simply because the child in this case is not alleged to be physically or mentally disabled. I should expect that a jury would be unlikely to award much, if anything, in the way of damages when the child is a normal, healthy child, although the jury might well award substantial damages when the child is disabled. But I see no principled reason to distinguish between the two cases, and say that in the case of the disabled child, where the parent’s distress may be readily accepted by the jury as *376genuine and the foreseeable result of the doctor’s negligence, damages may be awarded, but in the other, they may not be. The difference between the two cases is not in principle but in difficulty of proof. It is not our role to say to a litigant that because her damages may be difficult to prove, she may not even try to prove them. We should rather trust the jury, here as we do in other cases, to appraise the worth of the evidence presented to it. Suggestions that the parent will receive a windfall, or the doctor be disproportionately punished, seem to me to come down to an expression of lack of faith in the jury system. I think I could distinguish between the two cases. I therefore conclude that so could some one else, assigned to sit on a jury.