‘3. “Wrongful birth action” means a cause of action that is brought by a parent or other person who is legally required to provide for the support of a child, which seeks economic or noneconomic damages because of a condition of the child that existed at the time of the child’s birth, and which is based on a claim that a person’s act or omission contributed to the mother’s not having obtained an abortion.’

After reading the stuff Google handed me on “wrongful-birth lawsuit”, these sorts of lawsuits involve a “you didn’t tell me the fetus had Condition X/yes I did” dispute between the doctor and patient, or “if only you’d done Test Y we’d have known about Condition X.” None of the cases in my (brief, I admit) search involved a doctor misleading their patient. All this law says is “you can’t sue the doc unless he caused Condition X or contributed to the severity”, that second condition detailed in:

‘D. This section shall not preclude causes of action based on claims that, but for a wrongful act or omission, maternal death or injury would not have occurred, or handicap, disease, or disability of an individual prior to birth would have been prevented, cured, or ameliorated in a manner that preserved the health and life of the affected individual.’

Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I would think that a doctor deliberately misleading a patient would fall under “fraud”, and be actionable anyway. I really don’t see this as a matter of pro-lifers rubbing their hands, chuckling “now the doctors can tell a woman her fetus will be fine, even when it will have Downs Syndrome, bwahahahaha.” This is about clamping down on the way, way out-of-hand malpractice lawsuit industry — albeit combining it with abortion, which brings the pro-lifers firmly on board even if they’re otherwise iffy about tort reform. And given the tendency for people to sue everyone in sight when something bad happens, it makes reasonable sense to me to explicitly spell out that a doctor isn’t liable for problems he didn’t cause or make worse. Otherwise, we’re on path of logic that leads to “the doctor was wrong about the survival stats on my husband’s type of cancer. If he’d known how low his odds were, he’d have killed himself rather than go through all that horrible chemotherapy. Now we’re suing the doctor for a bazillion dollars for the suffering my husband went through!”

The whole thing is eerily like the scene in Ayn Rand’s “Anthem”, where the protagonist shows the science council his rediscovered electric light, only to be told that it’s evil because, among other things, it will hurt the makers of candles.