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Originally Posted by WOW!USaidSomethingSmart!
I agree a compensation should be in order, however, if the baby is harmed or dies before birth, it needs to be proven that it occurred because of the medication mix-up. People can inherit harmful diseases or mutations, be exposed to toxins, the mother can provide malnutrition or harmful substances, etc... . So while a compensation should occur, somehow the pharmacy needs to know the harm was due only to the medications and absolutely nothing else. That's hard to prove because the mother can say she cared properly yet the baby ended up malformed or impaired and the pharmacy would only have the mother's word to go on.
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Toxicology tests and medical examination would resolve the questions regarding the extent of the medication's role in such harm. Genetic factors can also be picked out via DNA profiling. It's more of a problem when you're trying to establish causation from environmental factors from my understanding of the case law, but again medical examination would be able to identify any red flags in that regard and rest assured a pharmacy (or their parent company) will be quite insistent on such examination occurring. Legal causation is the more tricky area.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WOW!USaidSomethingSmart!
Furthermore, if the medications do contribute to the harm or death of the fetus along with the fact the mother ingested harmful substances or the fetus inherited diseases or a random mutation occurred, somehow the pharmacy needs to know how much the medications contributed. If there haven't been many studies to use to see the effects on humans, then there's no reliable data to use and it's down to medical insight. But if both are present, then giving full compensation is ignorantly downplaying the other effects that occurred.
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Again the above would establish such extent fairly conclusively, and I would imagine with something like an abortion pill the physiological effects would be well documented. As I said I believe it tends to be claims on the basis of environmental factors which are most problematic - it certainly has been the case here in the UK from what I recall. I may need to double-check that though.