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Is this woman the very worst mother in Britain?
Here is a cautionary tale for our times; it has many morals. Peter and Patricia Thompson of Thrybergh, South Yorkshire, longed for a baby. After five years of marriage, no baby had appeared, so they went to a private fertility clinic and paid pounds 1,600 for in-vitro fertilisation treatment.
As a result, Mrs Thompson gave birth to three babies in 1997. As everyone knows, fertility treatment is extremely tricky, and so are multiple pregnancies, but there are many people who feel that the grave risks are worth the great rewards.
Fortunately, all three of Mrs Thompson's babies were born healthy. Lucky woman. She recovered very well. In fact, she recovered so well that she became pregnant in short order, by the conventional method as far as I know, and gave birth to another healthy baby the following year, in 1998. What a happy ending, you may think.
The strange truth is, however, that Mr and Mrs Thompson say they are not happy at all. They felt unhappy enough to sue the fertility clinic for compensation, and on Thursday, at a High Court hearing in Sheffield, they won their case and were awarded damages. These are yet to be decided; they are asking for pounds 100,000.
You might well wonder what their problem was, or is. What did they need to be compensated for? It is simply this: they got too many babies. "I wouldn't have wanted three children," Mrs Thompson told the court. "I just wanted two babies or one baby."
She claims that the clinic did not gain her consent for implanting three embryos, and therefore that it must cough up for all the fuss, bother and expense of having triplets, not to mention that strange legal thing, the "loss of amenity".
According to my dictionary, amenity means, among other things, "the quality of being pleasant or agreeable, pleasant ways or manners". Mrs Thompson appears to have lost a lot of all that. It is very disagreeable, to put it mildly, to go to court and say you want compensation for having one baby too many - one day they will find out.
Furthermore, it is both disagreeable and odd to say so, when you went on very quickly to have a fourth baby. The Thompsons now say, in public, what I suppose is the only explanation in the circumstances, that the fourth child was a mistake. One day that child will find this out, too.
So three of the children will know that their arrival was so dreadfully inconvenient that their parents felt driven to sue for damages. And all four will know that two of them were not wanted. I found myself horribly reminded of the suicide and murder note of the child in Jude the Obscure to his impoverished parents: "Done because we are too menny".
Meanwhile, childless couples across the country who long for babies but are unable to have them, or unable to pay for private treatment, will stare at the Thompsons with astonishment and resentment. And taxpayers of all kinds will resent the fact that the Thompsons brought this distasteful suit at our expense, on legal aid.
I am quite prepared to believe Mrs Thompson's claim that she did not agree to the implantation of three embryos. I am quite prepared to believe the clinic blundered, if only in good faith. I can also imagine how very hard it must be to carry triplets, and how much harder to look after them. Incidentally, I am glad to think that the Thompsons had enough "amenity" left to make the "mistake" that led to their fourth child; from their accounts of their dreadful exhaustion, you might have wondered.
Of course, their life must have become much harder. But surely the point is that having a baby is not like going to the supermarket or thumbing through the mail order catalogue. You cannot just order what you want. There are no shoppers' guarantees or consumers' statutory rights of any kind.
Whether you have your baby naturally or with the help of technology, it is quite extraordinarily risky; with technology, the risks are even greater. Your entire life may be turned upside down, and in unimaginable ways; everyone who wants a child must accept that.
When you have a baby, you get what you get. For some people, that proves to be a tragedy; I insist on saying tragedy, whatever the commissars of the disability lobby may say. A badly damaged child means a badly damaged family, for life.
Mrs Thompson might have produced only one baby, but it might have been very damaged. She might have had only two implanted, but one might have developed into a twin, and a very damaged twin at that.
Instead, she has had four healthy babies. She and her husband should consider themselves quite exceptionally lucky. And yet they feel hard done by; they feel that someone else must take responsibility, that someone else must pay.
Legally, they may have a case: morally, there is something very distasteful about their attitude. It combines existential arrogance with irresponsibility. It shows an unfeeling lack of humility in the face of imponderable things; inter alia, I mean a lack of humility in the face of one's own good fortune and other people's bad fortune, a failure of fellow feeling. As I said, there is a veritable surfeit of morals in this tale.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, November 18, 2000
