finding re-suiting injury to daughter actionable where hospital negligently transfused blood in woman years earlier, noting that the “time gap between the wrongful act and the suffering is immaterial;] [t]he cause of action is uniformly created not at the time of the negligent act, but only when the injury has been sustained”
How later courts described this case
- finding re-suiting injury to daughter actionable where hospital negligently transfused blood in woman years earlier, noting that the “time gap between the wrongful act and the suffering is immaterial;] [t]he cause of action is uniformly created not at the time of the negligent act, but only when the injury has been sustained”
- recognizing independent duty of care to fetus not yet conceived at time physician negligently caused mother's blood to become RH sensitized, noting "there is a right to be born free from prenatal injuries foreseeably caused by a breach of duty to the child's mother"
- recognizing a “right to be born free from prenatal injuries foreseeably caused by a breach of duty to the child’s mother,” where child was born impaired due to a negligent transfusion of Rh-positive blood to the mother several years prior to conception
- recognizing a cause of action on behalf of a child who suffered severe prenatal injuries as a result of defendants' negligent administration of an Rh-positive blood transfusion to her Rh-negative mother nine years prior to the child's conception
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARD, dissenting:
I agree with Mr. Justice Underwood’s observations.
The holding that a person not in being at the time of a defendant’s claimed negligence has a cause of action obviously creates conceptual difficulties, as well as concrete problems, such as how to measure the insurance risk and the possible exposure of a defendant to claims by successive generations of plaintiffs who complain of genetic injury. To say that, when difficult cases hereafter arise, the judiciary will draw “rational distinctions, consonant with current perceptions of justice” is to me simply a placebo.