Birth is a beautiful process. You’ve prepped for nine months, sometimes less, to bring home a healthy baby or babies. Your prep has included buying supplies, taking vitamins, going to classes, and regularly meeting with doctors to create a birthing plan and ensure you’re good to go. But what happens when it doesn’t go according to plan?
Our Lewisburg birth injury lawyer understands how devastating a birth injury can be. While many heal within weeks or months of your child’s life, some are permanent and affect the rest of their lives. In turn, that also affects yours.
Or maybe your baby comes out healthy and unharmed, but the mother suffers from a birth injury. That could leave you hurt, recovering, and traumatized for the rest of your life. You and your baby deserve compensation when you’ve been hurt during birth. At Stapp Law, LLC, we’re here to help you.
Most Common Types of Birth Injuries
Pregnancy and delivery of your baby can come with ample complications. Whether you suffer from gestational diabetes, a premature birth, or any other kind of complication before, during, or after the birth of your baby, you or your baby could fall victim to a birth injury. Even if your pregnancy is completely healthy, you could still suffer a birth injury as well—it could happen at any point.
According to the CDC, about three percent of all babies born in the United States each year suffer from a birth defect or injury. When looking at data from Lewisburg’s Evangelical Community Hospital, we can see that there are around 1,000 births a year at our local hospital. This means that statistically about 30 of those births had complications that led to birth injuries.
With those numbers in mind, it’s helpful to know just what types of birth injuries you or your baby could incur before, during, or after birth. That way, you can recognize what happened and get adequate help immediately.
Here are some of the most common types of birth injuries, as reported by Stanford Children’s Health:
- Bruising. This might seem like a minor injury, but to a newborn baby, bruising can be severe. When tools are used improperly or the baby isn’t handled carefully, they can suffer from bruising that shouldn’t happen.
- Broken bones. Similar to bruising, broken bones can occur from misuse of birthing tools or pulling the baby out in a dangerous way. As a mother, you could suffer from fractures as well.
- Erb’s palsy. When the brachial plexus nerve of a baby is damaged, it’s known as Erb’s palsy, brachial palsy, or a brachial plexus injury. Your baby’s arm and hand could suffer serious damage from this type of injury.
- Cerebral palsy. When a baby suffers from brain damage during birth, they could develop cerebral palsy. This is when muscles are underdeveloped, and neurological pathways are damaged. Children with cerebral palsy typically have weak muscles, muscle spasms, and trouble with motor skills.
- Facial paralysis. If certain nerves are pinched or damaged during birth, a child could suffer from facial paralysis.
- Vacuum injuries. When a vacuum is needed during delivery, many different injuries could happen. One is caput succedaneum or swelling of the scalp. Another is bruising and misshaping of the head.
- Subconjunctival hemorrhage. The blood vessels in the baby’s eyes could burst depending on how traumatic the birthing experience was.
- Cephalohematoma. A lump on the baby’s head could be a sign of bleeding between the skull and its covering. Severity depends on the size of the cephalohematoma.
- Lack of oxygen. Whenever a baby’s oxygen supply is compromised during birth, they can suffer from serious brain damage and other injuries.
These aren’t all the injuries that could happen to your baby during birth—they’re just some of the most common injuries they can suffer from. However, your baby isn’t the only one who can be injured during birth. Mothers can also suffer from childbirth injuries.
When a mother incurs a birth injury, it’s due to medical negligence. The birth injuries that mothers can suffer are vaginal tears, post-partum hemorrhage, ruptured uterus, prolapsed uterus, epidural errors, and emotional injuries from a traumatic birthing experience.
Whether the baby or the mother was harmed during birth and delivery, you could use the help of a Lewisburg birth injury attorney. We’ll fight to get you the compensation you deserve after a doctor’s negligence harms you or your baby.
Damages Your Baby and Family Could Suffer
After one or more of the childbirth traumas listed above happens to you or your baby, you likely want to take legal action so that you can get justice for the harms you’ve sustained. In any personal injury claim, you want to recover the physical and emotional damages caused, but there are more damages to consider in a birth injury claim that our lawyers know to include.
When it comes to economic damages, otherwise known as the physical costs you suffered as a result, your attorney will look to the receipts you have of bills and costs you incurred. Medical bills for the mother and baby, cost of treatments, and lost wages of the parents from missing work. The additional aspect of economic damages that need to be considered in birth injury claims is future care costs.
If the injuries the baby or mother sustained leave them with a disability, they could require long-term care, medical equipment, lost earning potential, and medical expenses that they otherwise wouldn’t have incurred. This could also mean that the parents will need more time off work or permanently unable to work if they need to take care of their child full-time. All of this factors into the damages you can recover from the injury.
Noneconomic damages, or the more abstract costs, will also be important for your birth injury attorney to help calculate. Pain and suffering, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, disability, and other emotional suffering can all be included in the damages your baby and family can recover when you’ve suffered a birth injury.
Our experienced Lewisburg birth injury lawyer knows all the aspects that go into birth injury damages. At Stapp Law, LLC, we’re here to accurately calculate what you’re owed and fight to get you full and fair compensation for what you and your family have been through.
How Our Lewisburg Birth Injury Lawyer Can Help
At Stapp Law, LLC, we understand how devastating a birth injury to you or your baby can be. You deserve to be compensated for what you’ve endured, but it could feel too intimidating to take legal action after a traumatic event like this. That’s where our Lewisburg birth injury attorney comes in.
We’ll fully investigate what happened, collect evidence, and prove the medical professional’s negligence is what cause you or your baby’s childbirth injury. Reach out to our office today so we can schedule a free consultation to discuss your potential claim.
