Is there a duty of care as to obtaining informed consent, not only to the mother but also to the fetus?

If there is a theoretical difficulty with the proposition that the physician owes a duty of care, as to informed consent, not only to the mother but also to the fetus, which at that time has no legal rights, that difficulty applies no less to the situation in Cherry v. Borsman, discussed above. As noted in Reibl, at 892, the duty to obtain informed consent is contained within a more general duty of care: [I]t [informed consent] arises as the breach of an anterior duty of due care, comparable in legal obligation to the duty of due care in carrying out the particular treatment to which the patient has consented. Thus if the law in British Columbia recognized in Cherry a duty of care in relation to a fetus, this duty must also of necessity encompass a duty to obtain informed consent.