`titrebCompensation for a handicap at birth : a real debate or just a question badly put ?`/titrebIn several judgments delivered in the years 2000 and 2001, the Supreme court of appeal allowed that a child born handicapped could obtain compensation for such a handicap from the doctor whose fault or error in an ante-natal diagnosis deprived his/her mother of her freedom to stop the pregnancy. These judgments caused a debate of a rare intensity at various levels : legal, ethical, social and philosophical. The legislators in March 2002 sought to quash the jurisprudence by going beyond what justice demanded. After having demonstrated the essential reasons which justify in the view of the author some criticism of both the civil jurisprudence and the law, the article foresees another legal basis for the medical responsibility necessary. It proposes separating the damages linked to the handicap from the impossibility of terminating the pregnancy, and to base the responsibility of the doctor on the unusual charge of maintenance, this latter having committed the fault of convincing the parents, who were in error about the state of their child and about what was required from them. Such a solution on the basis of civil law implying compensation for the full damages resulting from the handicap alone, would be combined without any problem with those payments paid out in the name of national solidarity. It argues in a fairer and more worthy manner for two different but complementary systems for taking in charge any person stricken with a serious and incurable handicap from birth.