Court Opinion

ID: 9540250
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:14:05.108592+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:59:47.507641
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE UNDERWOOD, also dissenting: I agree generally with Mr. Justice Ryan’s statements of legal principles and the rationale of his dissenting opinion. It would serve no useful purpose to rephrase those sentiments here, but several observations may be appropriate. The attempts by the majority to find support for its result are not at all persuasive. The reference to a husband’s action for loss of consortium as a result of injuries to his wife is, of course, inapposite for the injury there is to a presently existing relationship. Nor are Jorgensen v. Meade Johnson Laboratories, Inc. (10th Cir. 1973), 483 F.2d 237, and Park v. Chessin (Sup. Ct. Queens County 1976), 88 Misc. 2d 222, 387 N.Y.S.2d 204, helpful. The former was a strict liability case not relevant to this negligence action, and the latter a trial court decision presently in the appellate process. As this court emphasized in Cunis v. Brennan (1974), 56 Ill. 2d 372, 375, and in Mieher v. Brown (1973), 54 Ill. 2d 539, 544, foreseeability is not conclusive as to the existence of a duty, and I have a great deal of difficulty with the concept of a duty owing to a person who is not yet conceived, particularly when recognition of that concept permits a lawsuit to be filed 50 or 60 years after the negligent act from which it arose. Conceding the foreseeability of the injury and its causal connection with the alleged negligence of defendants does not convince me that our existing rule limiting liability to post-conception injuries should now be abandoned. Considering the likelihood of suits filed decades after the alleged negligence occurred, the difficulty of proving or defending against such claims, the impossibility of actuarial measurement of the risks involved, successive recoveries by unborn abnormal generations affected by genetic changes, the absence of persuasive precedent and what I suspect will be unanticipated hazards usually accompanying ventures into uncharted waters, I believe this departure from our rule denying recovery for preconception injuries is both unnecessary and undesirable.