What to consider when claiming for a birth injury

Suing for a birth injury?

Birth trauma or injury Claiming for compensation for a birth injury/trauma may help you to feel a little better. You are 'doing something' - it will help you to gain a bit more control. It will help particularly, if successful, that moment when you walk out of court knowing that justice has been done. More importantly for some it may mean the funds to obtain specialist care.

Is it going to cure your trauma? No.
Is it going to change things for you at home? Possibly, depending on needs and compensation awarded.
To what extend will that satisfy you? That depends on many factors.

What else you should be considering

The legal process is likely to add another layer of stress/difficulty. It will to some extend complicate your situation now - when you are already feeling fragile - and potentially over the next few years.

Therefore, you and your partner/spouse may want to prepare yourselves to deal with the following:

You will also be dealing with the actual loss. If you have an injured baby you will somehow have to come to terms with the 'loss' of a healthy baby. It takes time to learn to deal with the complications a special needs baby brings and huge emotional energy.
If you baby has died you will grieve.
If you had a traumatic delivery/ had complications - that will affect you. It would be absolutely 'normal' to feel in emotional turmoil from whatever should have been, but wasn't.
The rest of the family will still need your attention - perhaps even more so now. If you already have children, they are likely to realise that all is not well and they may need extra reassurance. Your extended family and your friends will be impacted by all that has happened and somehow you need to find the strength to deal with that.
The stress of the legal process may hamper your/your wife or partner's recovery from post trauma stress or any other post-postpartum symptoms.
The legal process is likely to be a lengthy one (at least in the UK - I am not sure what it would be like in the States or anywhere else), possibly with many twists and turns: feelings of frustration, anger, disappointment and helplessness are not uncommon. The process will make demands on (both) your time, energy, finances and emotional resilience.
Looking after a newborn, with or without special needs, is going to take a lot of energy, particularly if you have other children.
If you are a stepparent there may be additional demands too, particularly if this is the first baby in the new relationship. Individual family members will all need to adjust to the new family structure and there may be some jostling for position, jealousies and difficult behaviours, as well as the excitement.
Very importantly - the whole legal process will also have an impact on your relationship. Not necessarily a bad one of course, but it rather depends.
Your and your partner/spouse's distress will have an impact on your other children - present and perhaps future. This need not be a negative if it does not last and you are able to help your children cope. Younger children will have no concept of what is going on for you, so they won't give you any leeway.
If you suffer from post-natal depression, the legal process could potentially prolong this distressing condition.

The birth injury/birth trauma and your relationship

Birth injury lawyer The whole legal process itself can put an additional strain on your relationship/marriage. Before you start the process do be sure to discuss in detail what both your expectations are.

Do you both agree on what your reasons are for claiming compensation? What are you hoping a positive outcome will bring you? How do you anticipate you will deal with a negative outcome? Have you talked about what the length of the process might mean to you? Have you discussed any financial implications?

There is a danger that at any one stage it all begins to feel too much for either one of you. One of you may want to give up on the process, regardless of what you agreed on at the start. How supportive will you or your partner be if that were to happen and you have invested so much - in terms of money, time and emotional energy?

Healing after the trauma

When you have gone through something so traumatic, your brain/mind/body needs time to heal. That healing is a process as much as the legal process is. It too has various stages. You (both of you) need to be shielded from additional stresses as much as possible. "Some chance" you might say - you are dealing with 'life'!

For your trauma to have a chance to heal properly you would ideally want to avoid having to go over the 'facts' more that you would normally to come to terms with it. However, the legal process may interfere with the natural healing.

What next

I hope that you now have sufficient information about how suing might affect you, your husband or boyfriend, and your other children, so that you can plan ahead and muster all your resource. Perhaps all this will also help you to have a really useful conversation with your lawyer/solicitor.

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