[2][3] The appellant, Alexia Harriton, was a 25-year-old woman with severe congenital disabilities that had been caused by her mother's infection with the rubella virus while pregnant with her.

According to Chief Justice James Spigelman, the proposition that the duty of doctor to an unborn child extended to conduct that, properly performed, would lead to the termination of the pregnancy "should not be accepted as it does not reflect values generally, or even widely, held in the community.

[16] Richard Ackland, a journalist and lawyer,[17] criticised the judgment in the Sydney Morning Herald, arguing: What the majority position fails to accommodate is that there is a new modern order.

[18]Margaret Fordham, a legal academic, wrote after the judgment that for wrongful life claims to gain acceptance, "the courts would have to undergo a complete change of heart with respect to the moral and ethical implications of such actions".

[21]Dean Stretton, a lawyer writing in the Melbourne University Law Review, claimed that the High Court's judgment "regressed", "depriving the plaintiffs of a legally justified remedy by resort to inconsistent logic and ill-considered policy".