$6.5 Million Settlement for Birth Injury / Cerebral Palsy

Blume Goldfaden partner Carol L. Forte represented a severely neurologically impaired child. At the time of the child’s birth in 1999 at Monmouth Medical Center in New Jersey, despite the ominous pattern displayed on the fetal monitoring strips, the supervising attending obstetrician, the obstetric residents and two nurses all failed to recognize the signs and symptoms of fetal distress during the labor period. The defendants failed to perform a timely Cesarean section delivery of the child in light of this fetal distress, and permitted the mother to labor for 10 hours, during which time the baby sustained an ongoing lack of oxygen to the brain causing severe brain damage. The child is now institutionalized in Connecticut. Ms. Forte obtained a $6.5 million settlement in this case.