 The question wrongful life raises in the law is whether a gynecologist or obstetrician who has failed to communicate the advisability of genetic testing, or the lab that has negligently generated a falsely reassuring test result, can be held liable to the impaired child under a claim of negligence. In the absence of the negligent act or omission, that particular child would never have existed at all. Yet in most cases the child’s life is unambiguously worth living. We thus seem forced to say that the negligent act has not harmed the child. Harm – in the intuitive, comparative, worse off sense of that term – being an essential element of any claim in negligence, it also seems that the child’s action against the doctor or lab should be dismissed as legally invalid. Yet we may well think that the tort law system should be construed as a way of incentivizing medical personnel to work to insure that the children whom their efforts help to produce are born free of impairment. And we may also think that the parents’ claim – called wrongful birth – against those same medical personnel for the additional expense of caring for an impaired child is not an adequate incentive – especially in light of statutes of limitation that cut off the parents’ claim (in contrast to the child’s) soon after the child is born. Legally, then, we face a dilemma – a case where the law of negligence should be understood as insisting that medical personnel be vigilant in advising and conducting genetic testing but where, thanks to the logic of the nonidentity problem, those same personnel are in a position to understand in advance that any negligence on their part cannot harm their most plausible victims. 