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Power Rogers & Smith: Birth Injury Law

Power Rogers & Smith are lawyers based out of Chicago, Illinois, providing legal counsel to families whose children have suffered birth injuries. Here is some birth injury law advice that answers common questions that plaintiffs ask our Illinois lawyers on birth injuries, birth defects, and birth-related, traumatic brain injuries:

What is a birth injury? Birth injuries can come about as a result of malpractice and negligence by the medical staff, doctors, nurses or midwives. A brain injury can occur during pregnancy, labor, delivery or immediately after birth of a baby. If a medical professional is careless, makes a mistake or omits to act in a medically accepted manner, a baby could suffer a birth injury or even die as a result.

What are the most common birth defects?
One of every 33 babies is born with a birth defect. A birth defect can affect almost any part of the body. The well being of the child depends mostly on which organ or body part is involved and how much that part is affected.

Many birth defects affect the heart. About 1 in every 100 to 200 babies is born with a heart defect. Other common birth defects are "neural tube defects," which are defects of the spine (spina bifida) and brain (anencephaly). They affect about 1 of 1,000 pregnancies. These defects can be serious and often life threatening. They happen less often than heart defects, but they cause many fetal and infant deaths.

Birth defects of the lip and roof of the mouth are also common. These birth defects, known as "orofacial clefts," include cleft lip, cleft palate, and combined cleft lip and cleft palate. Cleft lip is more common than cleft palate. In many places of the world, orofacial clefts affect about 1 in 700 to 1,000 babies.

Some birth injuries that may occur due to substandard care are:

• Bone fractures
• Damage to the spinal cord
• Bruising and skin irritation
• Paralysis
• Infections
• Brain damage
• Internal bleeding
• Injury due to forceps
• Cerebral Palsy
• Brachial Plexus

These are just a few of the birth defects that can occur during labor and delivery.

Who can be responsible for my child's birth defects?
The hospital, the doctor, the nurse or the midwife could be responsible for your baby's birth defect if they did not act in a professionally accepted manner when monitoring your pregnancy or delivering your child.

What is a traumatic brain injury (TBI)?A significant physical force to the head can cause nerve cells in the brain to stretch, tear, and pull apart, making them unable to relay messages from one part of the brain to another. Sufficiently forceful trauma to the head causes the brain suddenly and violently to slam against the bony structures of the interior of the skull resulting in "traumatic brain injury." The head striking an object, (a windshield or the ground,) at a fast rate of speed or something striking the head, (a flying or falling object,) can cause brain injury. Injury to brain cells interferes with all sorts of information processing such as thinking, remembering, seeing, and controlling and coordinating bodily movements.

Traumatic brain injury can range from relatively mild to catastrophically severe depending on multiple factors including degree of force, multiple trauma, neurological complications, and timeliness of emergency medical treatment.

Why is it possible for the same apparent level of brain injury in two different persons to produce very different degrees of outcome?
Just as no two people are alike, no two brains are alike. Brain injury manifests itself depending on a host of factors such as intellectual capacity, physical health, age, emotional stability or instability, attitudes toward illness and health, concurrent (non-brain) injuries, quality of immediate medical attention following an injury, psychological adjustment or maladjustment, and dozens of other factors. Also, just as the kinds and amount of physical injury (broken bones, soft tissue contusions, or lacerations) vary among individuals involved in accidents, so do the amount and kind of head rotation, impact speed, and other factors that determine the degree of injury.

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