Pennsylvania Birth Injury Law

A birth injury may occur when a physician or medical practitioner fails to respond to a patient's distress or when poor quality care is provided during the pregnancy or child birth process. These factors may affect the mother and child with life-long injury or disability. Paralysis, brain damage, and even death can occur if a doctor and other medical personnel do not provide adequate medical care.

Increasingly, lawyers are called upon by parents of seriously disabled infants or children to determine whether such injuries occurred at or around the time of birth and were avoidable. Any lawyer, who casually begins such an undertaking, seriously underestimates the enormity of the challenge posed by such cases.

Perinatal brain or other vital organ dysfunction cases can arise out of mismanagement of the pre-birth course, the post-natal course newborn period or a combination of both.

The evaluation of the new birth injury case inquiry should entail making an assessment of the probable strength of the available evidence having a bearing on liability, causation and damage issues.

How can victims of avoidable birth injury seek justice and compensation?

First, one has to determine that the injury was not only preventable, but should have been prevented, and that’s quite different. 

Sometimes one learns, for example, that a bridge is out, and you learn that if you had made a right turn at an intersection instead of a left, that you would have lived. But you don’t have any reason to have known that if you had made the right turn you would have avoided the bridge that was out and avoided dying or killing someone in your car by driving off a cliff into a deep pool of water. 

There is a difference between preventable and should have been prevented. 

Should have been prevented means that there were signs: “Bridge Out”, “Don’t Go That Way”, there were signs that were ignored. In the case of children who suffered birth injuries, that is our first job, to learn the mechanism that led to their injury and whether it was not only avoidable but whether it should have been avoided. 

Then comes the challenge of assembling that evidence necessary to prove that the injury was both avoidable and that it should have been avoided. Then securing a level of compensation which enables the victim and their family to meet the dramatic economic challenges which are faced by such children. 

One means we use is the formation of a special needs trust. Such trusts, if appropriate in a particular case, permit you to be eligible for public forms of assistance, like medical assistance that will pay for hospital bills, for the illnesses that complicate the lives of such children. 

With special needs trusts, the fact that you have secured a sum of money in a settlement does not make you ineligible for public benefits and leaves money available to add all those things which public forms of support do not provide, like for example, a van, a wheelchair accessible van with a lift, changing your house so that there are ramps so that everything can be accessed on a single floor. Bathrooms with wheelchair accessible doorways and the proper support ramps and bars to permit you to live in relative safety. Kitchens with counters that are built lower so that people in wheelchairs can reach the necessary cooking tools and live as independent a life as possible under the circumstances.