Recognizing Birth Injuries Weeks or Months After Delivery

A child’s birth is one of a family’s most cherished moments, filled with the joy of welcoming a new family member and expectations for the child’s future. When parents begin to suspect that their child suffered a birth injury, their child’s future suddenly becomes uncertain.

Sometimes a birth injury is immediately apparent, with signs like forceps marks, a broken collarbone, or serious injuries such as Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), with severe brain damage. But what if a birth injury isn’t immediately apparent? How do you recognize the signs of a brain injury weeks or even months after the child’s birth?

Delayed Signs of Birth Injury

Often, the signs of a birth injury are too subtle during the hours and early days following a birth for parents or even medical professionals to observe. Often, it isn’t until a child begins missing milestones that parents suspect a problem. Common delayed signs of birth injury include the following:

• Persistent feeding problems, such as difficulty with the suck, swallow, and breath reflex
• Abnormal muscle tone with stiffness or floppiness
• Motor skill delays, such as missing milestones like rolling over, sitting unsupported, pulling to a stand, crawling, walking, and speaking
• Uneven facial features (signs of facial nerve injury or facial palsy)
• Balance and coordination problems
• Unusual response to stimuli, like light, touch, or sound
• Difficulty with fine motor skills
• Impaired vision
• Tremors or muscle spasms
• Seizures

If you suspect your child has suffered a birth injury based on one or more of the above signs, it’s crucial for the child to undergo a complete medical evaluation by a pediatrician. Physical examinations and blood tests can determine whether or not a child suffered a birth injury and inform parents of possible outcomes.

Most states, including Illinois, have Early Intervention Programs that assess children with suspected developmental delays and provide services before pre-school.

What Are the Common Causes of Birth Injuries?

Birth injuries can be as mild as an abrasion on a child’s scalp caused by a forceps delivery, or they can be severe or catastrophic injuries, such as a hypoxic brain injury or spinal cord damage. The most common causes of birth injuries in medical malpractice cases include the following:

• Failure to identify a high-risk delivery
• Failure to perform timely medical intervention, such as a C-section, during a maternal or fetal medical emergency
• Improper use of forceps or vacuum extractors
• Failure to properly monitor fetal heart rate
• A care team’s failure to inform the attending physician of a change in fetal or maternal medical status
• Lack of oxygen to the baby’s brain due to cord problems, placental abruption, or extremely low maternal blood pressure
• Prolonged labor
• Positioning problems, such as shoulder dystocia (baby lodges below the mother’s pubic bone)
• Cephalopelvic disproportion (infants head is too large for the mother’s pelvis)
• Failure to identify a maternal infection

If a laboring mother or infant experienced medical problems or a medical emergency during labor and delivery, and a child shows later signs of birth injury, such as missed milestones or seizures, the attending physician, labor and delivery care team, or the medical facility could be liable for the family’s damages through a medical malpractice birth injury claim. Reach out to our Chicago medical malpractice attorney for assistance.

Hiring an Attorney to Navigate a Birth Injury Claim

A birth-injured child may face impacts ranging from mild cognitive and motor delays to cerebral palsy, epilepsy, blindness, or cognitive impairment. A birth injury lawyer in Chicago investigates all aspects of the birth injury, identifies the breach of the provider’s legal duty of care that caused the birth injury, and carefully calculates the past and future economic and non-economic damages to obtain the maximum compensation available and a sense of justice for the family.