In this video, John McCarthy answers the frequently asked question, “Which types of birth injuries cause cerebral palsy?”
Overview
Cerebral palsy is a very broad term, which refers to a number of neurological injuries that can be caused by different events during pregnancy. They can be caused by an infection during the term, they can be formed as a result of a lack of oxygen during the delivery process, or they can be acquired after birth as a result of the baby contracting meningitis or some other illness. It’s basically how the events that gave rise to the cerebral palsy were managed that determines whether or not there might be a cause of action.
They reckon that one in five babies who have cerebral palsy sustained it as a consequence of the delivery process itself, so there are a lot of other babies out there where it is not known what caused cerebral palsy and it certainly wasn’t as a result of the intrapartum care that they received. For this reason, cerebral palsy cases are often fought very vigorously by the hospitals, because there is a potent argument that even if the child does have cerebral palsy and if there were complications at birth, that’s not to say that that was the cause of the cerebral palsy.
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