What price for a child?

Can we really let judges put a price on a child's head - counting the cost of even the food in its mouth, but none of the immeasurable gains in its life?

Let's rewind. Ms G and her partner, Ms M, are Melbourne lesbians who decided to have a baby.

They went to Armellin and were offered a choice of donor sperm. They picked a Danish donation -- ensuring, incidentally, that their child would most likely never know their father.

For their first attempts to get pregnant, Ms M underwent artificial insemination, telling Armellin she accepted the one-in-20 risk, or hope, that she'd end up with twins.

Three times she tried, and failed.

Ms G then asked Armellin for IVF treatment, in which the egg is fertilised with donor sperm outside the mother's body to create an embryo.

He agreed, but warned IVF had a failure rate of 70 per cent. That is why two embryos are usually transferred each time - because the greatest wish of most parents having IVF is to have a child, not to avoid having two.

I should add: two embryos would double Ms G's chances of having a baby, but also increase the chance of twins from one in 1000 to one in five.

It seems Ms G wasn't that keen on children, and couldn't decide what to do. But a month later she and Ms M went to a fertility centre and signed a form agreeing to have it prepare "up to two" embryos for Armellin to insert.

On November 10, Ms G had six eggs harvested, and was told to ring the centre the next day to find out how many had been successfully fertilised.

She didn't, so a nurse rang with the good news: there were five embryos ready for her IVF treatment the next day. With luck, she'd soon be a mum.

Ms G did not tell the centre's nurse that she'd changed her mind and now wanted just one embryo inserted.

Nor did she say it to the nurses who signed her in to hospital and prepared her. In fact, she hadn't even told Ms M.

She didn't tell Armellin, either, until he happened to lean over her in the operating theatre and ask: "Are we going to implant two?"

It was then that Ms G hesitated and said: "No, only one."

When Armellin warned that even one embryo could make two children, Ms G replied: "Don't even joke."

So why did Armellin insert two embryos, just minutes later?

Armellin wasn't, in fact, an employee of the fertility clinic, and had had nothing to do with the preparation of Ms G's embryos. He'd assumed that

Ms G in this casual chat wasn't telling him anything she hadn't officially told the fertility clinic, which had an embryologist waiting outside with a straw of the embryos she'd ordered.

So he inserted a catheter into the now sedated Ms G and called in the embryologist, who had just 60 seconds to insert the straw before the embryos warmed too much to take.

Only when the embryologist stepped back, did Armellin say: "I understand that she only wanted one embryo."

The conversation then went like this:

"No, she signed for two."

"Oh, f... ."

So nine months later Ms G and Ms M got not just the daughter they'd said they wanted, but another just like her they said they didn't.

In fact, this twin almost destroyed their lives, they complained.

Ms G now wanted compensation for her "anger at the violation", and for being made to feel "sick", "anxious", "distressed", "devastated" and "terrified" at carrying twins, plus extra for some heartburn.

She also wanted money for her "grief" for the loss of a life with Ms M and one child, and for not being able to travel overseas - something she said was possible with one child, but not two.

Indeed, she'd even fretted that her relationship with Ms M might collapse, leaving her alone with these twins.

Ms M then complained that Ms G had had less love to give, because of the extra child, and had suffered post-natal depression.

But both women said they nevertheless did now love both their girls, despite having considered aborting one or giving her away.

Now they wanted only the best for the unwanted twin - including a private school and a separate bedroom, which Armellin should pay for, too.

At this stage you might wonder how Armellin could possibly be held responsible for a birth caused by a confusion largely of Ms G's own making.

Indeed, the judge who first heard this case in the ACT Supreme Court, Justice Annabelle Bennett, decided Armellin had not breached his duty of care, and it was Ms G who had been "negligent". She dismissed the women's claim.

What's more, she objected to this treatment of a child as a commodity "for the purposes of the assessment of damages" for a "wrongful birth".

But, she pointed out, the High Court had in the earlier and controversial Cattanach case, brought by a couple whose sterilisation failed, ruled that this was now the law, "and I am not free to apply my own views".

That meant she had to reckon, reluctantly, what the women would get if Armellin was, on appeal, indeed found to be responsible for the unwanted girl's birth and upkeep.

In that case, she figured, the women should get $317,000 for their pain and expenses, and that private school, less a third for the part they'd played in creating this circus.

But the ACT Court of Appeal this month overturned Bennett's wise ruling and told Armellin to pay Ms G and Ms M the full $317,000.

It has yet to publish its reasons, but I'd guess its judgment would offend an overwhelming majority of Australians. And no wonder.

Leave aside the craziness of an obstetrician made more responsible for a child's upbringing than her own father, Mr Donor of Denmark.

How can we have a law that reduces a child's life to a dollar amount?

How can the value of that child be reckoned only in the distress and expenses it brings, without also counting the far greater blessings?

Shouldn't the human calculators eyeing the cost of every slice of bread for the child's breakfast at least weigh against that the care that this child, grown adult, may later lavish on her mother, grown frail?

What a terrible mistake this is. A sin.

And the worst of it is in the harm it could do to the children involved.

Think of those mothers, nursing their grievances until their big day in court, knowing the worse they feel about their girl, the bigger the payout.

Think of those mothers, encouraged by the dollars to count the losses caused by a daughter whose greatest happiness lies in a love unconditional.

And think of that child one day learning she was so hated that her parents thought of killing her in the womb or giving her away.

Even Ms G and Ms M know what harm they may have done, which is why they asked the court to suppress their identities, hoping to hide from their twins how unwanted one had been.

As Bennett said: "(Ms G) is of the view that the information may be hurtful or cause psychological damage."

That this case involves a lesbian couple is a disaster for all lesbians, as it will strengthen popular suspicions that same-sex couples too often treat children as an accessory or political statement.

But it should be pointed out that the Cattanach precedent involved a straight couple who also had a child they didn't want.

There, too, at least one of the four High Court judges who agreed to compensation - against the protests of the other three judges - seemed to feel it very wrong to treat a child as more trouble and expense than it was worth.

But, added Justice Ian Callinan: "The fact that I might as a judge find it personally distasteful to be required to assess damages of the kind claimed can however provide no reason to refuse to award them of the application of legal principle requires me to do so."

Judges hate this law. The public would, too. Children will suffer for it.

There's only one thing to do: for our politicians to change it.

Demand that they do. It's inhuman.