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“The mere refusal to perform a promise does not constitute fraud,” the New Jersey Appellate Division said in affirming a ruling by Superior Court Judge Alexander H. Carver III in Hackensack in the case listed as “R.P. v. B.Y.”
The couple began dating in October 2010, court papers show. When the woman told her boyfriend she was pregnant and wanted to have the child, she claimed, he “threatened to terminate their relationship unless she terminated the pregnancy” and promised “he would remain in the relationship and would take her on a vacation to recover following the abortion.”
Based on these promises, she said in her lawsuit, she got an abortion on Feb. 24, 2011. He “ended their relationship shortly afterwards,” it says.
The ex-boyfriend, in turn, asked Carver to dismiss the complaint outright – which the judge did, following a court hearing, exactly a year ago this Sunday.
In her appeal of that ruling, the woman cited a 1957 case in which damages were paid to a spouse for “shame, humiliation, and mental anguish” caused by a bigamist.
The appeals panel, however, said she actually based her request for damages on a “breach of a promise to continue their relationship.”
Although it applies to marriage, Carver properly invoked the Heart Balm Act, which was enacted to prevent “manufactured” lawsuits that could be a “fruitful source of coercion, extortion and blackmail” and “used as devices for extracting large sums of money without proper justification” or to “force a settlement ” against “a reputable or wealthy or important member of the community,” the judges noted.
The appeals panel also found that Carver correctly supported the state Statute of Frauds as a defense because the ex-boyfriend’s alleged promises “were verbal and never committed to writing.”
In her appeal, the woman said Carver “misunderstood the nature” of her claims.
The lawsuit “was not about enforcing [the] defendant’s promise to remain in the relationship but instead about [him] intentionally interfering with her ‘recognized reproductive liberties’ by maliciously and fraudulently commandeering and corrupting [her] protected right to wield control over her body and to make her own reproductive choices,” she claimed.
In other words, her having the abortion – and not his ending the relationship – prompted the lawsuit.
“This is a distinction without a difference,” the appeals judges responded.
As Carver “correctly determined,” the panel wrote, “all of [her] claims were based on [his] promise to stay in her life, which is unenforceable.”
The woman’s decision to have an abortion “may have been influenced by [the] defendant,” the higher court wrote, “but she made the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy.
“Under the law and public policy, there is no cause of action for terminating one’s pregnancy and then regretting the decision due to subsequent events.”
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