A Mixed Verdict

A recent $50 million dollar jury verdict in a “wrongful birth” lawsuit in the Seattle area* has caught the attention of genetic counselors, hospitals, patient advocates, and legal experts. The ruling in this case may have both positive and negative implications for the genetic counseling profession. Let me be clear up front – I am not passing judgement on the verdict, the medical providers, the parents, the quality of care, or the laboratory. This case is very complicated and no doubt many details were not publicly reported. Although I know some of the parties involved, I was not directly connected to the case and I have no insider knowledge. Indeed, I did not know about the case until it hit the news.

In 2007 a woman underwent chorionic villus sampling (CVS) because her husband was a known carrier of a very subtle 2;9 translocation. The institution where the procedure had been performed had no genetic counselor working on the day the CVS was performed, contrary to departmental guidelines for complex cases. Somehow the details of the translocation were not clearly communicated to the cytogenetics laboratory. The fetus had an unbalanced translocation that was erroneously reported out as a normal karyotype. The couple continued the pregnancy to term and the misdiagnosis was detected after the child was born. In 2010 the couple sued the hospital, the laboratory, and the physician who performed the CVS. The physician and the plaintiffs entered into a “High/Low” agreement  in which the defendant agrees to pay a minimum recovery in return for the plaintiff’s agreement to accept a maximum amount regardless of the outcome of the trial. The medical center and the laboratory  were held equally responsible for the $50 million payout, with half the money going to a Guardian ad Litem for the child to pay for his medical care and other expenses and half going to the parents.

The core argument of the plaintiff’s lawyer was that the error would likely have been prevented if a genetic counselor had overseen the patient’s prenatal testing to assure that the critical information about the translocation was clearly communicated to the laboratory. The medical center had reduced the genetic counseling staff despite pleas from the maternal fetal medicine specialists and in the face of growing patient volumes and increasing net revenue. Lawyers for the plaintiff further claimed that the medical center and laboratory did not follow Error Prevention and Quality Management Policies and that the misdiagnosis was the result of a systemic failure. These arguments were important to the extraordinarily large size of the award; the missed diagnosis was attributed to “true negligence” rather than a one-time human error.

The outcome of this case can be beneficial in several ways for the genetic counseling profession. The jury acknowledged the critical role that genetic counselors serve in the delivery of medical care. For genetic counselors trying to justify their positions and salaries can now also argue that their institution’s legal vulnerability can be dramatically reduced by having an adequately staffed genetic counseling service. After all, genetic counselors’ salaries are a pittance in the overall hospital budget and pale in the face of multi-million dollar legal damages. Genetic counselors served as expert witnesses for both the plaintiffs and the defendants, further enhancing the profession’s status.

On the other hand, the verdict did little to improve the rocky and complicated relationship between genetic counselors and people with disabilities, their families, and their advocates. From the perspective of many in this group, prenatal diagnosis and selective termination are bright shining examples of society’s intolerance of people with disabilities. Because genetic counselors are integral to the delivery of prenatal diagnosis services, we are criticized for being part of a larger social and systemic bias.

Genetic counselors counter that they do not direct patient’s decisions, only support them. Genetic counselors are all too familiar with the gut-wrenching, emotionally draining process that patients go through when they decide to terminate or continue a pregnancy in which the fetus has a chromosomal imbalance. And in many situations, genetic counselors serve as advocates for people with disabilities and their families. But this defense does not hold water with those who argue that the very existence of prenatal screening is an insult to people with disabilities who, after all, do not see much in direct benefit from NIPS, amniocentesis, CVS, etc. What positive message can someone with disabilities find when half of the fifty million dollar award was for pain and suffering of the parents, and the very justification of the life of someone with disabilities is called into question when he or she is labeled “a wrongful birth?”

For now, we live in a society where women have the hard-earned right to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason they choose (although the ability to act on that right can be severely hampered by socio-economic status and governmental policies). Genetic counselors line up behind the defense that they nondirectively help women to act on this reproductive freedom. Disability advocates are often avid supporters of reproductive rights too but do not feel that prenatal testing is necessary to the expression of reproductive freedom and point out that society’s negative view of disabilities and unwillingness to allocate appropriate resources further worsens the effects of disabilities. The two sides seem to be at an impasse and the fact that genetic counselors might applaud this court’s decision may only further contribute to this impasse.

We cannot ignore the voice of our critics.  I am not sure what the solution is. Prenatal diagnosis is unlikely to go away unless abortion becomes illegal again. If genetic counselors suddenly decided to pull out of prenatal diagnosis services, I suspect that informed patient decision-making would deteriorate and people with disabilities would lose one of their few potential advocates in the prenatal system.

As a profession and as individuals we need to reach out to our critics and find some common ground, such as the recently developed Open Lines forum where disability scholars, genetic counselors, parents, and people with disabilities can openly and safely discuss their perspectives. Surely the two sides are not as dysfunctional as the US Congress. It will be painful and difficult, but great achievements often require great suffering.

* – King County (Washington) Superior Court Case # 10-2-43289-2, Judgment Record # 13-9-35173-6 & 13-9-33521-8

Note: Some of the information in this posting is based on an article written by the plaintiffs’ lawyer (Gardner T, “Significant verdict in wrongful birth suit” Trial News, January 2014, pp. 9-11).