Doctors and medical staff in hospitals in Tennessee and across the United States undoubtedly know how to handle the process of delivering babies safely. After all, they received years of training, but lawsuits alleging medical negligence continue to move through the civil courts. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 50,000 mothers and their newborn babies nationwide suffer birth injuries each year.
In many cases, the negligence involves failure to take prescribed precautions like monitoring the mother’s blood loss or waiting too long to administer medication for blood pressure that rises high enough to cause a stroke or even death. In some cases, medical staff fails to recognize the need for emergency C-sections. These and other acts of negligence can jeopardize the health and safety of mothers and their babies, often with lifelong consequences.
Birth injuries to babies can be anoxic, which involves oxygen deprivation, or they can be mechanical when excessive force during vacuum extraction or the use of forceps or other equipment injures the baby. While bruises, lacerations and bone fractures heal reasonably quickly, depriving a fetus or newborn of oxygen can cause lifelong disabilities. These could include, among others, brain damage, autism, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, epilepsy and even death.
Birth injuries to mothers and newborn babies often lead to medical malpractice lawsuits. However, this is a complicated field of the law, and proving medical negligence could be a daunting task. For that reason, most parents in Tennessee who find themselves in such situations choose to utilize the skills of an experienced attorney to navigate the ensuing legal proceedings in pursuit of recovery of economic and non-economic damages.
