A court ruling which ordered a German gynaecologist to pay child support for botching a contraceptive implant was condemned yesterday by the German media as scandalous.
The doctor, who fitted his former patient with a contraceptive device, has been ordered to pay €500 a month child support for the next 18 years.
The woman gave birth to a son in December 2002 and said that, as a result, she was unable to work to support herself and her baby.
"The existence of the child is not a case for damages in itself, but the need to support it financially is," Judge Gerda Müller of the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe said in her ruling.
In January 2002 the woman, then 21, went to her gynaecologist in Baden Baden because she had begun a new relationship six months earlier and did not want to become pregnant. She received an "Implanon" implant, a 4cm-long plastic tube inserted under the skin above the elbow. The tube contains a chemical to prevent pregnancy for the following three years.
When she returned to the doctor in July 2002, he told her that she was 16 weeks pregnant.
He said he could find neither the implant in her arm nor any trace of the contraceptive chemical in her blood.
The trained kindergarten teacher went ahead with the pregnancy as it was too late for an abortion but had to turn down a job she had just been offered in Switzerland.
Judge Müller rejected the appeal of the gynaecologist against an earlier judgment by a lower court.
Upholding the lower court's verdict, she said the woman's life plan had been "frustrated" by the birth of her son, now almost four years old.
The woman is no longer in a relationship with the father of the child, although he has accepted paternity.
The ruling obliges the doctor to make child support payments until 2020, which, according to current child support levels, will cost him more than €110,000.
Yesterday the conservative Die Welt newspaper wrote: "A child as a case for damages - this perverse idea has now been confirmed by one of Germany's highest courts."
While it should be welcomed that a doctor can now be held to account in the same way as a shoddy plumber, the newspaper said, how could a child whose parents had sought damages for its birth ever come to terms with the situation?
"In addition to the highly private inkling that he was not wanted by his parents, he now has official confirmation that he was born by mistake," it said.