In today’s world of direct-to-consumer advertising via the Internet, social media, glossy “Top Docs” magazine features and highway billboards, patients needing specialty medical care are increasingly crossing state borders to obtain what they believe is the “best” care. Accepting a referral from a local primary care doctor to a local specialist is largely in the past. An area of medicine where this occurs more frequently is pre- and post-conception care, which includes gynecological and obstetrical care, as well as genetic counseling and testing.
The mapping of the human genome more than a decade ago has made available testing for thousands of genetic disorders. Specialized treatment and testing can involve clinical indications, including advanced maternal age, a history of familial genetic disorders and elevated risk due to parental ethnicity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, patients in the New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania metropolitan areas are crossing state lines for this specialized care. However, when an impaired child is born, resulting in a wrongful-life or wrongful-birth medical malpractice lawsuit, and parties are residents of different states and/or the care is rendered by practitioners in different states, both plaintiff and defense counsel should be aware of the often-complex web of jurisdictional, choice-of-law, conflict-of-law and comity issues.
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