Parents’ Rights After a Birth Injury in Fort Lauderdale
Some birth injuries happen even when every doctor and nurse in the room does everything right. Others happen because someone missed a warning sign, waited too long to act, or pulled too hard during a complicated delivery. Florida law only lets parents recover compensation for the second kind, so knowing the difference matters before you decide whether to call anyone. A birth injury lawyer in Fort Lauderdale from Freidin Brown can review your baby’s delivery records and tell you which one actually happened.
Not Every Birth Injury Means Malpractice
A baby’s shoulder can get stuck behind the mother’s pelvic bone during a hard labor, even when the delivery team does everything by the book. That’s called shoulder dystocia, and it can stretch the nerves in a newborn’s arm and cause temporary weakness that resolves in a few weeks.
Permanent damage is a different story. When a doctor pulls too hard or at the wrong angle trying to free that same shoulder, the nerves can tear instead of stretch, and the arm never recovers full movement. But the proper response to a stuck shoulder involves specific maneuvers, like repositioning the mother’s legs or rotating the baby, not brute force. One outcome is bad luck. The other is a doctor’s hands doing damage that proper technique would have avoided.
Signs That Point to Negligence, Not Bad Luck
A few details in your baby’s chart can separate an unavoidable complication from a mistake.
- A flat or falling heart rate ignored – The fetal monitor showed trouble for twenty minutes or more before anyone acted. That gap between the first warning sign and actual delivery often decides how a case gets evaluated.
- No warning before a rough delivery – Nothing in the labor suggested a large baby or shoulder dystocia, yet the delivery still involved heavy pulling.
- A C-section offered too late – The option came up only after hours of a stalled labor that wasn’t progressing.
- Pitocin given without adjustment – Contractions stacked on top of each other with no change in the dose, a known risk for fetal distress.
Who Can Be Held Responsible
A birth injury claim rarely points at just one person. Several people in that delivery room had a duty to catch the problem. And the hospital that employs them can carry its own separate responsibility too.
- The delivering OB-GYN – The doctor managing labor and making the call on timing and technique.
- Labor and delivery nurses – Staff responsible for watching the fetal monitor and flagging changes to the doctor.
- The hospital itself – Responsible for adequate staffing and functioning equipment, including a working fetal monitor.
- An anesthesiologist – Involved if an epidural or anesthesia during an emergency C-section played a role in the injury.
What Can You Actually Recover?
Florida law lets parents seek compensation for more than just the hospital bill. Economic damages cover medical costs, past and future, along with any income a parent loses caring for a child with lasting needs. Non-economic damages cover pain and suffering for the child and sometimes for the parents who watched it happen. Florida used to cap non-economic damages in malpractice cases, but the state supreme court struck those caps down. A birth injury attorney in Fort Lauderdale can help calculate what a lifetime of therapy, surgery, and specialized equipment is actually likely to cost, not just what it costs this year.
How Long Do You Have to File in Florida?
Under Florida Statutes § 95.11(5)(c), a medical malpractice claim generally must be filed within two years after the incident occurred or within two years after the injury was discovered, or should have been discovered with reasonable diligence. Florida law also generally imposes a four-year limit from the date of the incident. However, that four-year limit does not bar a claim brought on behalf of a minor if the lawsuit is filed on or before the child’s eighth birthday. Missing the applicable deadline can prevent the court from hearing the claim.
Get Your Baby’s Delivery Records Reviewed
A difficult delivery doesn’t automatically mean malpractice, and it doesn’t automatically mean you have no case either. Pull your baby’s full delivery record, including the fetal monitor strips, together now. Get them reviewed by someone who can read what actually happened in that room. So don’t guess at which kind of birth injury this was. The records usually make it clear.