FORT KENT, Maine — High school students in Aroostook County will hear arguments Thursday in a challenge to the state’s wrongful birth law when the Maine Supreme Judicial Court convenes at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.
Justices were asked by a federal judge in Portland to interpret the statute after a Newport mother sued an Albion health care clinic and the pharmaceutical firm Merck over the failed implementation of a birth control device.
It is one of three appeals the court will consider in its annual appearances at Maine high schools. Justices will convene Oct. 26 at Marshwood High School in South Berwick. Maine’s high court visited Washington Academy in East Machias in May.
In the wrongful birth case, Kayla Doherty sued in April 2015 the Lovejoy Health Center in Albion, where she sought long-term birth control, and Merck & Co. Inc. of New Jersey, alleging the device was never implanted in her arm because of negligence on the part of the clinic’s staff and because the product is defective.
Doherty, 24, learned she was pregnant in September 2013 when she began feeling sick. On June 9, 2014, Doherty, then 21, gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Blake, whom she is raising alone.
She is seeking $250,000 in damages under the state’s wrongful birth law, which concerns claims against doctors when children are born unhealthily because of malpractice or negligence. Doherty’s case will test whether this law will apply to children born healthy.
The court has been asked to decide if state law prevents a parent from being compensated because “an unplanned pregnancy followed by the birth of a healthy child is not a recognized, actionable injury under Maine’s wrongful birth statute.”
The lone exception under the statute is for failed sterilization procedures such as a vasectomy or tubal ligation.
If the court rules Doherty can sue under the statute, justices also have been asked to rule on whether Doherty can collect damages for raising her child through college or just for medical expenses and lost wages during her pregnancy and recovery time from the birth of her son.
On Thursday, appeals in a child pornography case out of Penobscot County and an Aroostook County drug case also will be heard.
Russell Carter, 33, of Wiscasset was sentenced at the Penobscot Judicial Center last year to six months in jail, all of it suspended, for solicitation of a minor.
Carter claims that he intended only to have an online conversation and did not intend to meet or sexually assault the minor, according to information posted on the court system’s website. He also argues, he should have been tried in Sagadahoc County, where he lived, not in Penobscot County, where the Bangor police officer who posed as the minor, was working.
In the Aroostook County case, Chad Lagasse, 30, of Caribou claims that the arresting officers did not have probable cause to arrest him because the only evidence the police had against him was the statement of a man who had been convicted of making an unsworn false statement to police in the past and who provided information about Lagasse in order to gain leniency on his own charges.
Lagasse was convicted by a jury last year of aggravated trafficking in scheduled drugs, a Class A crime. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison with all but four years suspended, followed by four years of probation. He is incarcerated at the Charleston Correctional Facility.