[Pregnancy and unwanted children after failure of sterilization and voluntary termination of pregnancy. I. Disconcerting French and foreign jurisprudence].

Specialists who carry out abortions and male or females sterilizations which are legally controlled under the penal law in the category of voluntarily accepted assaults on the body can risk legal actions against the doctors as a result of parents seeking damages for detriment suffered following failure of legally performed terminations of pregnancy or of sterilisation, which had been considered as certain, resulting in preservation of fertility. The authors have looked through the western literature and found that there is both a moral and a financial detriment which plaintiffs can plead after the birth of a normal or a malformed child after an attempt at termination of pregnancy or at sterilisation. They take note of a list of cases of claims which have given rise to a whole body of jurisprudence in France since 1976 and which show that magistrates have some resistance to awarding damages for such detriment.