Can you sue your parents for having a disability?

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That's the legal standard.

The practical standard is more like "whatever you can convince the judge or jury of".

I have presented a dumpload of validated documentation to back up my claim, yet the case is still dragging on.

You'd have to prove your parents acted with malice and forethought, or where grossly negligent and there was a link between it and your getting your disability.

And if it's AS, no one even knows what causes AS.

The way your question is worded is making it sound like you want to sue your parents for having a disability which is ridiculous especially if they didn't cause it. If I were you, I would re-word it in a way in which this thread makes sense.

What if someone's parents knew their child had a disability, but did not want the child to know. Perhaps the child grows up & discovers this fact & becomes upset.

Statute of Limitations

Sue your parents? They're your parents, if you need money just ask them.

If both parents knew that their child would have a disability, but they had one anyway and said child was suffering because of it, then yeah, you could.

You need "negligence" in the least here.

Even if your mom chainsmoked while she was pregnant with you I doubt that you would have a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

Indeed not. Google informs me that many people do wonder if somebody with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome can sue his mom but google was unable to find me even a single case where such a suit was made, let alone won. Chain smoking, heavy drinking and drug abuse could possibly constitute negligence (in the hands of a very skilled lawyer) but yet google couldn't find me any such suits, won or otherwise. Just people asking if it was possible. In one discussion, a poster brought up the fact that any mom who did these things with enough vigor to actually cause a disability is so unlikely to have any assets that no lawyer would even bother even if they could prove negligence. Even in these cases where it could be possible to prove negligence, that is one heck of a slippery slope.

It is possibly arguable in the case of deliberate enviromental exposure that a all OB's warn pregnant women against. Maybe no lawyer has taken it on because such moms won't have recoverable assets. Maybe it's too much of a slippery slope to be winnable. Nobody wants to be the one to rule in favor of that and thus open up floodgates of a governmental control over reproductive rights that would make outlawing abortion look downright permissive.

But when it comes to something that:

1)does not have a firmly established cause that can be proven such as a specific enviromental trigger or known genetic cause that is tested for and that abortion is advised for

2)is not uniformly agreed to be something that nobody should ever be born with (especially argued on WP!)

then there is no case. No case at all. Nor should there be.

Parents do owe certain things to their children as the price of bearing them. These things are spelled out legally and the price of violating them is negligence charges. "Freedom from disability" is not one of those things unless the parent causes the disability after birth by a negligent or illegal action. (also listed by Fnord upthread.)

Slopes really don't get any more slippery than the one the OP is about to slide down.

There have been suits by parents for wrongful birth against doctors/hospitals. But that is different from the child suing the parents. It is very, very different indeed. To sue for what is essentially wrongful birth against a parent would change the entire way that reproductive rights are viewed and not in a good way. In the distant future if such a thing as "designer children" with bespoke DNA ever come to exist, such a thing would seem reasonable in that society. In a distant future when having kids is no longer a roll of the dice but instead a shopping trip to select just the right genome, this suit would make sense. I will fight against such a future if it arises in my lifetime (it probably won't) and so will a lot of other people. Gattaca was a dystopian movie for a reason.

Last edited by Janissy on 21 May 2013, 8:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

No you couldn't. That isn't negligence.

No. Now why in the world would I want to sue my parents because I am who I am? That makes absolutely no sense to me. Sure, when I was diagnosed with AS after all these years and I grew up in a time when the tools to diagnose people were not available (pre-1990s), I was mad like crazy. I wanted to blame everyone - the doctors, the specialists, my mom, etc. But sue all of them? For what? That I am an adult with AS/high-functioning Autism and there was nothing I can do about it?

I *thank* my mom each and every time I talk with her for doing the best she could to bring me into this world when the tools for diagnosing autism were not available. There's nothing legal that I can use at my disposal to sue my mom, even if I wanted to do so (and this has nothing to do with morality, either).

I can't sue my mom on the grounds for the five elements of negligence because I live with Asperger's. Besides in the 1960s, the vast, vast, majority of people in the United States here didn't know squat about autism... what causes it and so on.

1. Defendant (my parents) owed a duty of care to the plantiff (me). Well, given nothing was much known about autism, how could have they have known at the time was ok and what was not ok?
2. Defendant breached that duty of care to the plaintiff. Again, not anything about autism was known at the time, so how could have they breached that duty of care?
3. Plaintiff was injured as a result of the breach - we all know now that autism is hereditary in nature and so how could I be injured as a result?
4. Causation in Fact - Again because autism was not known at the time, my parents would not have known if anything they could or would have done might have led to my "actual injury" that I sustained for living with Asperger's since an infant.
5. Proximate Cause - Could my autism have been prevented if my parents stopped doing whatever they did that caused my autism? No, because again in the 1960s, nothing was known about autism. So, if my parents are not informed about autism when the tools are not available for an autism diagnosis, then proximate cause does not rule into negligence on their part as to why I live with Asperger's.

Thus, there is no negligence on my parents' part as to why I have lived with Asperger's since most likely I was an infant. Thus, any reasonable judge would throw out any frivolous lawsuit I could have against my parents on those grounds.

Actually this would make an interesting premise for a fictious case for an episode of a primetime TV courtroom drama ( the Practice, the Good Wife, LA Law, etc).

But in real life - well I have a buddy who has all kinds of mental problems.

His parents were both alchoholics and pill poppers ( his dad was a doctor- so they were rather affluent at one point). Much of his problems were from being raised in his violent dysfunctional and substence abusing family. But I suspect some of it was from the womb-from his mom drinking when he was being carried. Both before and after his birth there was plenty of bad parenting to say the least.He is dyslexic, and has schzioid personality disorder ( i believe thats his label), and other stuff. But he and his brother inherited his parents assets anyway. So suing them (even in the short window before they kicked the bucket anyway) wouldve accomplished nothing financially for the two of them.

So based on my buddy and his negligent parents situation I dont see the point of suing one's parents even if you could win.

What would it be then?

Having a child that you know would be disabled and subsequently suffer due to such fits the definition of negligence. The proper course of action is to not have a child if it's going to be disabled and consequently suffer in comparison to its peers.

It'd fit the definition of abuse too.

You have knowledge of something "bad" happening
You have people doing it anyway

That's no different than driving when impaired in some way and causing disability if you hit someone.

Even if you could prove that your parents knew they had an ASC and that it had a major genetic component, you still couldn't win, because of the Equal Protection Clause. Basically, a couple who is biologically capable of having children has the right to have children. If you start putting restrictions, such as restricting those with heritable disabilities, then you start to go into eugenics territory, which is constitutionally suspect and today universally condemned. There is no state law that establishes eugenics and so no legal support at all for your lawsuit.

Basically, by saying your parents are liable for having given birth to you because of a possibly heritable disability, you are making a case for eugenics. Any court in the United States would strike down, both because of the principles set in the Equal Protection Clause and because no state or federal law supports, and there may be some that go against it. You don't have a case.

Now, if your issue is that you don't have enough support for your disability, then you need to more effectively lobby for disability services, not do a dickish move to attempt to reestablish eugenics.

Winning such a suit would entail restricting the reproductive rights of the parents for being disabled. Not going to happen, at least not in the States.