SB 341 introduced by Senator Becker extends Indiana’s Child Wrongful Death Act to a “fetus that has attained viability.”
I am uneasy about the Child Wrongful Death Act generally. If someone’s wrongful acts caused parents liability for costs and expenses of medical care, funeral expenses, and the like, I am certainly on board for making the wrongdoer pay for those things. But when it starts to look like parents are profiting from their child’s death, it starts to get creepy. That unease increases when parents get get money for the lost love and affection of their fetus. In my mind, these are not things that reduce themselves well to monetary damages. The law imposes this sort of solution all the time — mone for pain and suffering in personal injury cases — but at a certain point, I just feel like you get to a place where money isn’t a very good metric. I feel like the loss of a fetus is in that area. Will the jury conjure up some idealized infant with unlimited potential, never causing any trouble for the parents? Or would the jury consider whether the people bringing the suit would have been good parents in the first place? Factor in the hardships and expenses of parenting that the parents won’t be incurring? (As a litigator, how do you even bring that up to the jury without them feeling like you’re being an insensitive ass and jacking up the price even further?)
And, finally, how do you put a price tag on “love and affection?” Comparing money and an unborn child’s affection isn’t like comparing apples and oranges, it’s like apples and, I don’t know, maybe solar eclipses.
Then there’s the fun of defining “viability” – does a being who is so brain-damaged that there’s a 95% likelihood that they would die in the newborn ICU count as viable? This is a pretty fuzzy area here –
All of the hazards mentioned above and more. And “viability?” In 30+ years, the scientific, medical and religious communities have not been able to agree on exactly when when that occurs.
The point of this proposed legislation, I believe, is a toe-hold, a crack (pick your metaphor) to beginning to dismantle Roe v. Wade. They are trying to give your fetus personhood status. (It’s just a matter of time before they start campaigning to give the fetus the right to vote.)
NancyJ,
The right to live is granted to a child that has been born for only a few seconds, yet they can’t vote. No one is being that silly.
Yes, they are trying to give a fetus personhood status. Calling an identical object a “baby” when it is born 1 month premature and another a “fetus” when it is expected to be born in 1 month may be using correct medical terms. However, saying that one gets different rights than the other, even though they have the exact same parts and age, seems pretty illogical to me.
Whatever the motive behind this, I think it is pretty interesting. I remember being in torts class and a good friend of mine, who was also a conservative, evangelical Christian, stating that he didn’t believe that there should be such a thing as liability for wrongful death. His reason being that accidents happen, how can one really put a monetary value on a life, etc., etc. (Evidently he wasn’t listening during the prolonged discussion of how courts determine the value of a life.)
While my friend’s views were probably on the extreme end (and really borne from youthful arrogance and ignorance), I’ve found that in general conservatives are uneasy–to put it mildy–about tort liability, particularly product liability and wrongful death. And yet, this bill seems to be one that conservatives *would* support.