What wrongful birth and wrongful conception claims are

These are parents' claims about lost choice: either a pregnancy that should never have occurred, or a pregnancy continued without the information the parents were entitled to. Irish practice groups them into two categories, and it helps to name a third and fourth that people often ask about.

A wrongful conception claim, sometimes called a wrongful pregnancy claim, arises where the negligence happened before conception. The usual examples are a tubal ligation or vasectomy performed negligently, a failure to warn that the procedure carries a known failure rate, or a failure to tell the patient afterwards that the procedure had not worked. A wrongful birth claim arises where the negligence happened during the pregnancy: an anomaly scan read to an inadequate standard, a genetic or screening test wrongly reported or wrongly communicated, or a failure to refer for the diagnostic testing that should have followed a concerning result. In each case the parents say that, with proper care or correct information, they would have made a different decision.

The negligent failures follow recognisable patterns. In sterilisation and vasectomy cases: a clip applied to the wrong structure, a procedure that was never going to be effective, a failure to warn of the known failure rate, or a failure to confirm the result. After a vasectomy, accepted practice is to advise continued contraception until semen analysis confirms the procedure worked; skipping or mishandling that step is a claim in itself. A failed tubal ligation also carries a recognised higher risk of ectopic pregnancy, and where that risk materialises it forms part of the injury. In screening cases: a scan read below the accepted standard, a result wrongly reported or never communicated, or a high-risk screening result acted on without diagnostic confirmation.

These claims are distinct from birth injury claims. A birth injury claim concerns physical or neurological harm caused to the child or mother during pregnancy, labour or delivery, such as cerebral palsy following undetected fetal distress. A wrongful birth or wrongful conception claim does not say the medical team injured the child. It says the parents were denied the chance to make an informed decision. The evidence, the defendants and the recoverable losses are different, so the two claim types should never be confused. Claims about negligent fertility treatment, where the aim was to achieve a pregnancy, are a separate category again.

The Irish legal position on wrongful birth claims

Ireland has one fully fought line of authority on wrongful conception, and a short but decisive post-2018 history on wrongful birth. Understanding both is the key to realistic advice. [FIRM TO VERIFY: anchor holdings below against current practice before publish]

In Byrne v Ryan [2007] IEHC 207, [2009] 4 IR 542, the plaintiff's tubal ligation at a Dublin maternity hospital failed and she later gave birth to two healthy children. Kelly J found the sterilisation had been performed negligently, that the hospital owed its public patient a direct duty, and that she had not been properly told the procedure had failed. She recovered damages for the pregnancies, the births, the associated suffering and the cost of corrective surgery.^[1] The court refused, on grounds of principle and legal policy, her claim for the cost of rearing the two healthy children, following the House of Lords in McFarlane v Tayside Health Board [2000] 2 AC 59^[11] rather than the contrary Australian approach in Cattanach v Melchior [2003] HCA 38,^[12] and drawing on the value the Constitution places on the family and on human life. In Hurley Ahern v Moore [2013] IEHC 72, the High Court confirmed that a mother's damages after a failed sterilisation extend to the after-effects and complications she suffered, while rejecting the father's parallel claim as pure economic loss.^[2]

Wrongful birth took a different path, and the reason is constitutional. Before 2018, a claim built on the lost opportunity to end a pregnancy collided with Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution, so Ireland simply had no decided wrongful birth case. The first one reached the High Court in 2018: a mother who carried a rare genetic condition was wrongly told an antenatal genetic test was clear, and her child was born with a profound disability requiring round-the-clock care. Weeks after the referendum, the defendant hospitals conceded liability and withdrew the public policy defence. Their letter, read in court, put it plainly:

"In the particular circumstances of this case and in light of the outcome of the recent referendum repealing the 8th Amendment" the defendants were conceding liability.

Defence correspondence of 13 June 2018, as reported by the Irish Examiner; the High Court (Cross J) approved an interim payment of €1.8 million with the child's future care needs to be reassessed^[16]

The spectrum was completed in 2021. A couple, Rebecca Price and Patrick Kiely, ended a wanted pregnancy in March 2019 after a screening result and an initial laboratory report wrongly indicated Edwards syndrome, a condition likely to lead to the death of the foetus. Full analysis after the termination found no evidence of the condition. The five consultants of the fetal medicine clinic involved, the National Maternity Hospital and the external laboratory conceded liability in full before the High Court.^[17] In December 2025 the HSE publicly apologised to the couple, and an external review of the care in the case is under way as of mid-2026.^[18] Both the 2018 and 2021 cases were concessions rather than contested judgments, so they resolved the families' claims without deciding every legal question for future cases. That distinction matters, and the next section explains where it bites.

What may be claimed

Damages follow the injury to the parents: the pregnancy and its physical toll, recognised psychiatric injury, and the financial losses that flow from the negligence. Like every claim we handle, these cases are ultimately about fair compensation for injury in Ireland, and here the injury is the parents' own. Compensation is made up of general damages, for pain, suffering and loss of quality of life, valued with reference to the Personal Injuries Guidelines, and special damages for financial losses. What is recoverable in this specific claim type has firm edges in some places and genuinely open questions in others. [FIRM TO VERIFY the current Irish position on recoverable heads of loss: this is essential]

Two practical notes sit behind that table. First, the healthy-child rule is settled: the Irish courts treat a healthy child as a benefit the law will not price, so the claim compensates the pregnancy and its consequences, not the child's existence.^[1] Second, the disabled-child question is the live one. In the 2018 case the family received a substantial interim payment directed at the child's care, with future needs to be reassessed, but because liability was conceded, no Irish judgment has decided whether the extra costs of disability are recoverable as of right. English authority says yes for the additional, disability-related costs.^[13] An Irish court would have to decide whether to follow it. Anyone advising on such a case should treat the point as open. In practice, cases involving lifelong care needs can be resolved through interim payments with the child's needs reassessed over time, which is exactly how the 2018 case was structured. The same body of law also fixes the partner's position: in Byrne itself, Kelly J refused the husband's parallel rearing-costs claim in a companion judgment, and Hurley Ahern confirmed that a father's standalone financial claim is pure economic loss.^[2] We do not publish figures for any head of loss on this page: the value of a claim depends on the severity of what happened and the losses that can be proved.

A caution for anyone who has been reading UK firm guidance, which dominates search results for these claims: the two systems agree on some points and part company on others.

How do you prove a wrongful birth or wrongful conception claim?

Every one of these cases must clear three hurdles: breach of duty under the Dunne principles, causation built on what the parents would have decided, and proof of loss. The claim proceeds as a medical negligence action in the High Court. Because these are health-service claims, section 3(d) of the PIAB Act 2003 exempts them from the Injuries Resolution Board (IRB): there is no assessment stage, and proceedings issue directly.^[10]

Breach is measured by the test in Dunne v National Maternity Hospital [1989] IR 91: was the care such that no practitioner of equal status and skill, acting with ordinary care, would have provided it?^[3] The Supreme Court reaffirmed that standard in Morrissey v HSE [2020] IESC 6, which also addressed the standard of approach expected of screeners, directly relevant where a scan or slide was read to an inadequate standard.^[4] An independent expert medical report from a consultant in the relevant specialty is the gateway: without it, the claim cannot responsibly be advanced.

Causation is where these claims differ from other medical negligence work. In a wrongful conception case the question is relatively contained: but for the negligent procedure or the failure to warn, would the pregnancy have occurred? In a wrongful birth case the court asks what the parents would have done with accurate information, and the answer is assessed against the options that were lawfully open at the time. For events since 1 January 2019, that means the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, which permits termination in early pregnancy under section 12 and, under section 11, where two practitioners form the reasonable, good-faith opinion that there is present:

"a condition affecting the foetus that is likely to lead to the death of the foetus either before, or within 28 days of, birth."

Section 11(1), Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (No. 31 of 2018)^[8]

Timing does real work here. Because section 12 is confined to early pregnancy, with a mandatory three-day period after certification, a negligent delay in performing, reporting or explaining a test near that boundary can itself extinguish the choice the law gave the parents. In a case built on delay, the loss of the lawful window is the deprivation. For earlier events, the 2018 concession case shows the counterfactual can rest on the constitutional right to travel that existed before repeal. Contemporaneous records matter enormously here, because they prove what you would have done. The documents that decide these cases include:

• the referral letter and consent documentation for the sterilisation, vasectomy or test, including any recorded discussion of failure rates;
• post-vasectomy semen analysis results, or the absence of any request for them;
• the scan images and the sonographer's report, not just the letter summarising them;
• the screening or genetic test report as issued by the laboratory, and every note of how it was communicated to you;
• genetic counselling notes recording your stated intentions; and
• your own contemporaneous records: appointment notes, messages, diary entries showing what you were told and when.

What the parents did when concerns first arose is read alongside all of this. Where the argument is that an earlier, accurate result would have changed the clinical pathway rather than guaranteed a different outcome, the loss of chance question can arise and needs careful handling.

Screening cases carry one more technical layer. Non-invasive prenatal testing, including the Harmony test, analyses placental DNA fragments in the mother's blood, and it is a screening tool, not a diagnosis. A recognised biological cause of false positives is confined placental mosaicism, where the anomaly is present in the placenta but not the baby.^[19] Accepted practice is that a high-risk screening result is confirmed by diagnostic testing, chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis, before any irreversible decision. Negligence in these cases often lies in how a result was reported, explained or acted on, which also shapes who the defendants are: the reporting clinic, the hospital and an external laboratory can all be concurrent wrongdoers, as the 2021 concession illustrated, and medical negligence claims of this kind are routinely pleaded against each of them.

Who ultimately pays follows the setting. Claims against public hospitals are managed by the State Claims Agency under the Clinical Indemnity Scheme; a private consultant is indemnified separately through a medical defence organisation; and a private clinic or an external laboratory answers through its own insurers. None of this changes your claim, but it shapes how the defence is run and how settlement discussions unfold.

One more evidential point. If the hospital has already told you that something went wrong, under the open disclosure regime introduced by the Patient Safety (Notifiable Incidents and Open Disclosure) Act 2023, that disclosure cannot be used as an admission of liability. It matters, and it should prompt you to seek advice, but the claim still has to be proved with independent expert evidence.

Time limits for wrongful birth and wrongful conception claims

The limitation period is two years from the date of knowledge, and in these claims the date of knowledge is very often later than the negligence itself. The rule comes from the Statute of Limitations 1957 as amended by the Statute of Limitations (Amendment) Act 1991 and the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004.^[9] The date of knowledge is when you first knew, or ought reasonably to have known, the essential facts connecting your situation to the care you received.

In practice the clock tends to start at different points for each claim type. After a failed sterilisation or vasectomy, it is usually the discovery of the pregnancy, or the point at which you learned the procedure had failed. In a missed-diagnosis wrongful birth case, it is commonly the diagnosis of the child's condition, at or after birth. In a wrongful termination case, it is typically when the definitive results showed the earlier report was wrong. These are patterns, not rules, and the analysis is fact-specific.

One distinction catches families out. A child's own medical negligence claim, for an injury negligently caused to the child, can be brought up to their twentieth birthday because time does not run during childhood. A wrongful birth or wrongful conception claim is different: it belongs to the parents, so the adult two-year period applies to the parents from their date of knowledge. Do not assume the longer children's window covers this claim. The general rules, and their exceptions for incapacity, are set out on our medical negligence time limits page.

Support, sensitivity and how we approach these cases

These cases sit close to grief, and a legal claim is only one part of what a family is dealing with. Some parents come to us while caring for a child with profound needs. Some are grieving a pregnancy that ended on advice that turned out to be wrong. Nothing about making a claim requires you to frame your child, or your loss, in any particular way, and we will never ask you to.

Support exists alongside the legal process. Your GP can refer you for counselling, maternity hospitals have bereavement and patient liaison services, and Citizens Information can explain the practical entitlements that may apply to your family's circumstances. Parents who received a fatal foetal anomaly diagnosis often mention the peer support of Leanbh mo Chroí (LMC Support) and TFMR Ireland. Privacy is also protected where families want it: in the 2018 case the High Court ordered that nothing be published that would identify the mother or child.^[16] If and when you want to explore the legal side, we start with a confidential conversation, your records, and an honest view on whether the evidence supports a claim. There is no obligation at that stage, and no pressure to continue beyond it. Where a claim does proceed, our medical negligence no win, no fee arrangement means costs are not the barrier to finding out where you stand.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Byrne v Ryan [2007] IEHC 207; [2009] 4 IR 542, High Court (Kelly J), 20 June 2007. BAILII. Accessed 5 July 2026.
2. Hurley Ahern v Moore [2013] IEHC 72, High Court, 1 February 2013. BAILII. Accessed 5 July 2026.
3. Dunne v National Maternity Hospital [1989] IR 91, Supreme Court (Finlay CJ).
4. Morrissey v Health Service Executive [2020] IESC 6, Supreme Court.
5. Perez v Coombe [2025] IEHC 396, High Court (Egan J), 8 July 2025.
6. Walsh v Family Planning Services Ltd [1992] 1 IR 496, Supreme Court.
7. Kelly v Hennessy [1995] 3 IR 253, Supreme Court.
8. Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (No. 31 of 2018), sections 9 to 12. Office of the Attorney General, irishstatutebook.ie. Accessed 5 July 2026.
9. Statute of Limitations 1957, as amended by the Statute of Limitations (Amendment) Act 1991 and the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004. irishstatutebook.ie. Accessed 5 July 2026.
10. Personal Injuries Assessment Board Act 2003, section 3(d). irishstatutebook.ie. Accessed 5 July 2026.
11. McFarlane v Tayside Health Board [2000] 2 AC 59, House of Lords.
12. Cattanach v Melchior [2003] HCA 38; (2003) 215 CLR 1, High Court of Australia.
13. Parkinson v St James and Seacroft University Hospital NHS Trust [2001] EWCA Civ 530, Court of Appeal of England and Wales.
14. McKay v Essex Area Health Authority [1982] QB 1166, Court of Appeal of England and Wales.
15. Toombes v Mitchell [2020] EWHC 3506 (QB), High Court of England and Wales.
16. First wrongful birth case to be heard in Irish courts settled with interim payout of €1.8m, Irish Examiner, June 2018. Accessed 5 July 2026.
17. Couple settle High Court actions in wrongful termination case, RTÉ News, 23 June 2021. Accessed 5 July 2026.
18. Couple who had termination after wrongful advice highlight years of extraordinary pain, The Irish Times, 7 December 2025. Accessed 5 July 2026.
19. Screening tests during pregnancy, Health Service Executive. Accessed 5 July 2026.
20. Report of the Independent Review of the operation of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 (Marie O'Shea BL, 2023), Department of Health, gov.ie. [FIRM TO VERIFY current status and link]

Suggested citation: Matthews, G., "Wrongful Birth and Wrongful Conception Claims in Ireland" (Gary Matthews Solicitors, 2026) · personalinjurysolicitorsdublin.info/medical-negligence/wrongful-birth-conception/