Can a pregnant woman sue her unborn child?
British Columbia, Canada
The following excerpt is from R. v. Demers, 1999 CanLII 6632 (BC SC):
She next dealt with a submission that the unborn child could sue its mother, and had this to say at para. 27: Before birth the mother and unborn child are one in the sense that the life of the foetus is intimately connected with, and cannot be regarded in isolation from, the life of the pregnant woman: Paton v. United Kingdom (1980), 3 E.H.R.R. 408 (Comm.) at 415, applied in Re F (in utero) (supra). It is only after birth that the foetus assumes a separate personality. Accordingly, the law has always treated the mother and unborn child as one. To sue a pregnant woman on behalf of her unborn foetus therefore posits the anomaly of one part of legal and physical entity suing itself.
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