Missouri Law Review Volume 64 Issue 1 Winter 1999 Article 7 Winter 1999 Wrongful Life, Wrongful Birth, Wrongful Death, and the Right to Refuse Treatment: Can Reasonable Jurisdictions Recognize All But One Mark Strasser Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mark Strasser, Wrongful Life, Wrongful Birth, Wrongful Death, and the Right to Refuse Treatment: Can Reasonable Jurisdictions Recognize All But One, 64 MO. L. REV. (1999) Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol64/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Missouri Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Strasser: Strasser: Wrongful Life, Wrongful Birth, Wrongful Death, Wrongful Life, Wrongful Birth, Wrongful Death, and the Right to Refuse Treatment: Can Reasonable Jurisdictions Recognize All But One? Mark Strasser* I. INTRODUCTION One of the most controversial birth-related torts is the wrongful life action in which a plaintiff sues for damages, claiming that he would have been better off never having lived at all and, but for defendant's negligence, would not in fact have lived. Most jurisdictions refuse to recognize this cause of action. However, the justifications for those refusals are often unpersuasive, since the acceptance of those rationales would imply that other existing practices must be changed. For example, although wrongful life and wrongful birth are different actions involving different duties and harms, many of the rationales for and against recognizing the former apply with equal force to the latter.