Austin Birth Injury Lawyers

Understanding Birth Injury Terms

To understand medical records and discussions about birth injuries, it helps to have a firm grasp on the various terms that the medical community uses to describe what most people think of simply as “the baby”:

• Fetus is the term used before birth, while gestating in the uterus
• Neonate is the term used for the period immediately after birth, generally for the first four weeks
• Infant is the term used from birth to roughly one year old

Conditions That Increase Risk of Shoulder Dystocia

The term “shoulder dystocia” refers to the relatively common event of the child’s shoulder getting wedged behind the pelvis of the mother during delivery. All kinds of injuries can occur to the child (and the mother), including loss of oxygen to the brain and shoulder injuries.

The risk of injury is elevated by various conditions, for example:

• A particularly large fetus
• A particularly small birth canal
• Difficult fetal position (such as feet first, called a footling breech presentation)
• Premature birth before the fetus has reached maturity

But these are all conditions that obstetricians are trained to expect, identify, and deal with. Failure to do so may constitute medical malpractice.

Common Types of Birth Injuries

One of the most significant birth injuries is cerebral palsy (CP), which affects overall brain function and, specifically, movement. It’s a lifelong condition that significantly diminishes the victim’s quality of life, but doesn’t progress over time. The cause is lack of oxygen to the fetal brain, which can occur while in the womb, during delivery, or even after delivery.

Whether malpractice by the doctor or other medical professional caused a specific case of CP is often the subject of extensive legal wrangling because, while malpractice certainly can cause CP, so can several other conditions. The best evidence of malpractice is verifiable fetal distress during labor and delivery which the doctor fails to address, either by correcting the cause of distress or promptly performing a C-section delivery. 

If you are curious about other common types of birth injuries, check out our blog!

Other Common Birth Injuries

The types of birth injuries are as numerous as the things that can go wrong during childbirth.

Among the typical injuries are:

• Injuries to the brachial plexus affect the group of nerves that supply the upper limb. Erb’s palsy and Klumpke’s palsy are forms of this injury. The injury affects sensation and/or muscle strength and may be temporary or, less often, permanent. The injury occurs during difficult deliveries that stretch the child’s neck.
• Bone fractures (especially the collarbone), bruising, and lacerations, often from use of forceps during delivery but may be from other causes, like shoulder dystocia.
• Lung inflammation from breathing in the child’s own feces (meconium) during difficult labor; “meconium aspiration” needs to be addressed immediately to prevent serious injury and/or death.

Why You Need an Attorney After a Birth Injury

Experience in handling birth injury cases is invaluable in pursuing a legal settlement, as the cases are inevitably complex. Is the infant’s condition the result of a birth injury or a result of a genetic birth defect? Did the doctor and/or hospital notify you immediately about the infant’s condition? What have they said about the condition’s cause, and is that claim backed up by the extensive records that accompany all births? What do the people present during the birth say about the events? What are the costs likely to be for a serious and lifelong injury?

Distraught parents of an injured infant need reliable and experienced legal help in dealing with these situations. Parents are at a distinct disadvantage given that almost all the records that document the birth are in the hands of the medical people who may have been responsible for the injury. It’s not uncommon for some of those records, often crucial records, to be missing. An experienced birth injury lawyer knows where other evidence showing the same thing might be located or, at the very least, how to use the absence of a record that should be there to help build the case.

The medical people involved also understand a lot more about the nature of the injury than your average parent. Even if the doctor and/or hospital admits that something went wrong and has offered some kind of settlement, you need to make sure that you know as much as they do before signing anything.