Wrongful Life and Wrongful Birth: The Devaluation of Life with Disability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the author argues that both wrongful life and wrongful birth suits promote attitudes that devalue the lives of people with disabilities. She begins by accounting for the nature and history of wrongful life and wrongful birth suits and presents key cases for each kind of suit. She moves on to argue that in wrongful life suits, the plaintiff must claim that non-existence is preferable to a life with disabilities. The defense and acceptance of such a claim contribute to the conceptualization of life with disability as a personal tragedy. In the wrongful birth cases analysed by the author, parents argue that they would have terminated their pregnancies if properly informed of the impairment-related risks. In light of the parents' admission, the author argues that in suits of this nature, the injury to parents is the child born, not the deprivation of informed choice. While parents are forced to take up the language of harm and burden – language that reinforces ableism – to qualify for the financial compensation awarded in wrongful life and wrongful birth cases, the responsibility for improving the lives of disabled people should be borne by society and taken up as a human rights issue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".