If you get pregnant because of defective birth control pills can you get your surprise bundle of joy’s college tuition paid for by the faulty manufacturer with a lawsuit?

Well, maybe not for that much but you could at least have a case to sue, says Slate’s Brian Palmer in The Explainer.

Pfizer announced yesterday that it’s recalling 1 million packets of birth control pills due to a manufacturing error that put the pills out of sequence. In most states, Palmer says, a patient who became pregnant from the faulty pills could have a case, though it would be harder to prove than a case of unwanted pregnancy due to a botched vasectomy or tubal ligation, since sterilzation doesn’t require “vigilance by patients” – the manufacture could allege that the woman just didn’t take her pills correctly.

A Georgia woman filed a class action lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company recently when she became pregnant due to a packaging error. We'll see how that one turns out.

As for the cost of that fancy pants tuition, you probably wouldn’t get that.

Get this: Palmer says that a very surprised mother couldn’t get restitution for expenses like food and clothing for her child because “Judges aren’t comfortable viewing life as a form of damage and argue that the costs of raising a child are offset by the joys of parenting.” Some legal scholars criticize this logic, which ignores the fact that the woman was taking the pill to avoid parenting altogether.

We would go it one step farther and criticize calling it “logic” in the first place. But at least it’s nice to know that if you get in on the great American pastime of unintended pregnancy (half our pregnancies are unintended) you can get in on another one, too: suing people.