Examples of common birth injuries resulting from malpractice range from brain injury that may result in impaired or delayed motor development or intellectual disability through to Erbs palsy and other brachial plexus injury. For a more complete discussion of the full range of birth injuries, their causes, and the obstetrical malpractice lawyer’s strategies for discovering the physician’s or hospital staff’s culpability in causing the injuries, please consider our Obstetrical Malpractice Lawyers and Birth Injury Attorneys page. Here we will discuss brain injuries which may not become apparent to parents immediately at birth, indeed commonly not resulting in parental concern until the baby fails to meet his or her expected milestones and in cases of mild intellectual disability may not be diagnosed until the child enters school. Brain injuries sustained at birth may be due to a number of causes, including oxygen deprivation, hypoxia, anoxia, or traumatic brain injury. There are a number of failures of hospital staff and obstetricians which can lead to brain injury. The hospital staff may not properly or timely apply fetal monitoring or fail to properly assess fetal distress, or they may fail to act sufficiently quickly to alert the mother’s obstetrician or the appropriate specialists to deliver the baby by cesarean section before the baby sustains brain damage. The obstetrician may fail to recognize fetal distress or delay delivery including by cesarean section to assure that the baby’s brain is not deprived of oxygen. (more…)