Yearworth v North Bristol NHS Trust
[2009] EWCA Civ 37
Court of Appeal (Civil Division)
Facts:
6 men were treated for cancer by the NHS trust. Their treatment rendered them infertile, but the trust offered sperm storage to each patient for their future use.
The sperm samples were irreversibly damaged when the storage system failed.
Legal Facts / Procedural History:
Exeter County Court
Court of Appeal (Civil Division)
Legal Issues:
Whether Y had ownership in their own body / bodily substances.
Whether the damage to the sperm could be constituted as personal injury.
Action:
Once the sperm samples were damaged, the claimants (Y) were unable to have biological children. Y allege that it is foreseeable that that they would suffer, at the least, an adverse reaction to the news that they could never be fathers. They brought their action in tort under personal injury and damage to their property, and in contract for breach of bailment conditions.
Judgement (Judge CJ, Clarke MR and Wilson LJ):
Y won. Men had ownership in the sperm they edjeculated.
Tortious Personal Injury:
Dismissed that the men were personally injured.
[23]: ‘…[I]t would be a fiction to hold that damage to a substance generated by a person’s body, inflicted after its removal for storage purposes, constituted a bodily or “personal injury” to him.’
Tortious Damage to Property:
The court broaden the scope of ownership so that they could have had legal ownership of the possessory title to the property.
[28]: ‘A decision whether something is capable of being owned cannot be reached in a vacuum. It must be reached in context; and in this section of our judgment the context is whether an action in tort may be brought for loss of the sperm consequent upon breach of the Trust’s duty to take reasonable care of it.’
The court focused on Y’s right to use the sperm and how the damage breached the NHS’s duty of care. Y’s right to use means they have a kind of property right in the sperm, but this is not the same as ownership of the human body.
[28]: ‘The concept of ownership is no more than a convenient global description of different collections of rights held by persons over physical or other things’
Even if we possess our bodies, we do not own them in property law.
[30]: a ‘living human body’ means there can be no ownership.
[33]: a ‘human corpse’ could be different and depends on whether skill was applied onto it (Note: Locke’s theory of possessive individualism).
[38]: in matters of parts or products of the living human body, the ‘common law’s treatment of such parts and products as property’ is on a ‘boarder basis’.
Breach of Contract:
Not relevant for property course.
Comments