Article by Philip G. Peters, Jr.
Because tort law is designed to insure compensation for harm, not adequate child support, tort law leaves children born as a result of tortious conduct inadequately protected. The problems and complexities associated with proof of harm in wrongful life and wrongful birth actions cause courts to significantly limit the recovery of compensatory damages. These limitations threaten to leave many families without the resources necessary to adequately provide for their children. To protect these children, lawmakers need to abandon their exclusive reliance on tort doctrine as it is traditionally construed.
Traditional tort law embraces an unduly narrow notion of corrective justice that fails to resolve wrongful life disputes satisfactorily. The unique circumstances associated with the creation of a new life bring into play another, broader paradigm of responsibility: one that resembles family law more than tort. From this perspective, children whose birth can be attributed to tortious conduct have a strong moral claim for supplemental child support whenever a tortfeasor's interference with the procreative rights of the parents foreseeably results in the birth of a child and that child's parents cannot provide adequate support. In such an instance, the tortfeasor's misconduct has irreversibly changed the status quo. A child has been born, and that child needs support. This fact materially distinguishes the consequences of this tort from other “harmless” negligence and justifies an obligation to contribute to the child's support.
Contrary to the assumption of courts that have decided the claims of children born due to tortious conduct, the obligation of tortfeasors to contribute to the support of the resulting children need not depend entirely on proof that the tortfeasor has “harmed” the child by causing a life so bleak that life itself is harmful. This traditional tort requirement may be appropriate for resolution of the child's claim for tort damages, but the child should not be asked to make this showing if the claim is instead for child support. Unlike tort damages, child support awards are not intended to compensate for harm. Rather, they are intended to protect the child's welfare by fairly apportioning support responsibility among the responsible adults.
As long as courts overlook the unique location of these cases at the juncture of tort and family law, the children's claims will not be properly evaluated. Negligence that results in the birth of a child raises issues that are central to both fields. It raises tort law concerns because the child's claim turns on proof that the defendant's conduct is careless or antisocial in a sense ordinarily regulated by tort law. At the same time, it raises traditional family law issues because it results in the birth of a child, which generates concerns about the adequacy of that child's support. Neither field, standing alone, can provide the tools necessary for full and fair resolution of the resulting claims.
Unless a doctrinal bridge is built between the two fields, these cases are destined for incomplete consideration. As negligence cases, they seem to have no place in family law. As tort cases, on the other hand, their child support components are unwelcome. As long as we feel obliged to compartmentalize these claims into one field or the other, cases of negligently induced birth are destined to be handled inappropriately.
A blending of the two doctrines is necessary to provide these children with adequate and just protection. For this task, lawmakers will have to bridge the boundary between family law and tort. The resulting cause of action for backup or secondary child support should be a hybrid of tort and family law in which tort law defines the duty and family law the remedy. Carefully fashioned, it would result in a fairer and more subtle reconciliation of the rights and responsibilities of all the parties than existing tort law standing alone.
Without question, an action for backup child support would require an extension of existing legal doctrine. The normative basis for the claim is, however, powerful enough to justify re-examination of the doctrinal barriers. Although a boundary crossing of this sort has no direct analogies in family law or in tort, each field provides some important raw materials for building the necessary bridge. Indeed, courts that prefer to use familiar doctrines could provide some of the same protections for these children by extending existing tort rules governing wrongful birth, rescue duties, or the calculation of damages. But these approaches have problems that make direct acknowledgment of a new tort-based action for child support superior.
Doctrinal and methodological barriers have hindered explicit consideration of a tort-based child support claim by either courts or scholars. Once a court characterizes a child's claim as a tort claim, the relevance of family law notions of financial responsibility and child welfare are overlooked. Even the few courts that allowed recovery by children born as a result of tortious conduct insisted on analyzing the claims exclusively as torts. Because these courts permitted partial recovery without proof that the children had been “harmed” by birth, they were destined to be harshly criticized as inconsistent with the tort rules used to decide them. Regrettably, but understandably, the judges deciding these cases did not articulate a noncompensatory rationale to support their intuitive sense of corrective justice.
Because the possibility of a nontort rationale for a wrongful life remedy has gone unmentioned, no court has thoroughly analyzed the merits of a claim for child support. This Article is intended to begin that discussion.
About the Author
Philip G. Peters, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Law, University of Missouri-Columbia. B.A., Harvard University, 1972; J.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1976.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 397 (1992)