The Harm Paradox Tort La and the Unanted Child in an Era of Choice [Hardcover]

Offering the first comprehensive theoretical engagement with actions for wrongful conception and birth, The Harm Paradoxprovides readers with an insightful critique into the concepts of choice, responsibility and personhood.

Raising fundamental questions relating to birth, abortion, family planning and disability, Priaulx challenges the laws response that enforced parenthood is a harmless outcome and examines the concept of autonomy, gender and womens reproductive freedom.

It explores a wealth of questions, including:

• Can a healthy child resulting from negligence in family planning procedures constitute harm sounding in damages, when so many see its birth as a blessing?
• Can a pregnancy constitute an injury when many women choose that very event?
• Are parents really harmed, when they choose to keep their much loved but unwanted child?
• Why dont women seek an abortion if the consequences of pregnancy are seen as harmful?

An exciting and original contribution to the fields of medical law and ethics, tort law and feminist jurisprudence, this is an excellent resource for both students and practitioners.

The Beginning of the Decline.  Injured Bodies.  Health, Disability and Harm.  The Harm Paradox.  Constructions of the Reasonable Woman.  Reproductive Choice, Reproductive Reality.  The Moral Domain of Autonomy

The Harm Paradox is a trenchant and powerful review of the unwanted pregnancy - and, indeed, of pregnancy - as seen by a thoughtful and remarkably fair, though by no means impartial, feminist theorist. - J. K. Mason, Medical Law Review, vol. 15 no. 3 (November 2007)

Priaulx's analysis is thorough, well written and detailed. Readers who are interlã"