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Disabled children have started suing for being allowed to be born
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Israeli citizens with birth defects are increasingly suing medical authorities for allowing them to be born.
To date, there are already about six hundred such claims.
The question of the value of life of people with disabilities is extremely important. If this situation does not change, doctors will begin to be overly cautious in interpreting diagnostic tests and will recommend terminating even healthy pregnancies at the first suspicion of a defect.
On the one hand, it is understandable - negligent doctors condemn parents to endless expenses associated with caring for a disabled person. In September 2011, a married couple from California won a lawsuit for $4.5 million - specialists were unable to determine that the child would be born without legs and one arm.
In Israel, the situation is different. People themselves sue for being allowed to be born. And the parents of the children act as witnesses - they say that it would really have been better for our offspring not to have been born.
The government has taken an interest in this problem. A special committee has been created to study this issue. It is headed by Avraham Steinberg, a rabbi and medical ethicist at the Hebrew University.
One of the first successful cases in this area took place in 1980 in California; a man sued for being born with a neurodegenerative disease, Tay-Sachs disease. In Israel, a similar precedent arose in 1987. Meanwhile, cases of “wrongful life” are prohibited in many countries. In the United States, such cases are considered by only four states.
In Israel, these problems have arisen because of the fashion for genetic testing. "Today, there is a whole system of searching for the perfect child," says Carmel Shalev, a human rights and bioethics specialist at the University of Haifa. "Everyone wants healthy children and often pays doctors to undergo genetic testing earlier than required, and as a result, abuses occur..."
The popularity of genetic tests is partly due to the popularity of marriages between close relatives in Israel. The fact is that many settlements in Israel were founded only a few generations ago by a small number of people who still live as one big family and marry each other. In addition, representatives of different religions avoid each other. And since each person is a carrier of a certain number of defective genes, marriage with a blood relative increases the risk of autosomal recessive disorders, as a result of which healthy parents often have children with Down syndrome, deafness, cystic fibrosis... If both parents have one copy of the "faulty" gene, the probability of having a child with a defect increases 4 times.
Therefore, Israel offers a wide range of prenatal screening. In addition, it is permissible to terminate a viable pregnancy for health reasons. Even in Orthodox communities, abortion is possible if Down syndrome is suspected.
If a child is born and files a lawsuit, then for cystic fibrosis and congenital deafness, monetary compensation is on average 4.5 million shekels (9.6 million hryvnia). Currently, a lawsuit is being considered for fragile X syndrome, which can bring a person 10 million shekels (21.4 million hryvnia).
After several such cases, the Israeli Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology advised the Israeli Supreme Court not to treat all cases equally. Fundamental difficulties in learning or performing basic life functions (eating, toileting) should not be equated with the lack of a few fingers...
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