Birth Injury Victim Awarded $53 Million for Hospital Negligence

NATIONAL—Recently, I was reading about an Illinois jury awarding $53 million to a young boy. The boy was born with a severe brain injury after suffering 12 hours of fetal distress during delivery. In other words, the hospital did not do its job.

The $53 million award came after a month-long trial before Cook County Illinois Circuit Judge John P. Kirby for the 12-year-old Isaiah Ewing’s medical-malpractice case. Isaiah’s guardian sued the University of Chicago Medical Center in December 2013, alleging the mother’s physicians failed to recognize signs of distress to order an emergency cesarean section during her labor and delivery in 2004.

Sadly, the boy is confined to a wheelchair and needs his mother to feed and clothe him. In the end, the damages included $28.8 million for future expenses to take care of the boy, whose brain injury at birth left him with severe cerebral palsy.

Consequently, the award is the highest-reported for a plaintiff in a birth injury case in Cook County, according to media sources. If you work for a hospital, let this be a lesson as people will pay for the harm they cause.