Cook County Jury Awards $10 Million Over Undiagnosed Childbirth Tear at Rush

On July 2, 2010, a Chicago woman who is herself a physician went to Rush University Medical Center to deliver her baby. Her first child had been born by cesarean section after she failed to dilate. This time her doctors advised her to attempt a vaginal birth. Labor stretched across many hours, and the delivery team eventually used forceps.

During that delivery she suffered a fourth-degree tear, the most severe category of perineal injury, which reaches through the muscle of the anal sphincter and into the lining of the rectum. A fourth-degree tear is normally stitched closed soon after birth, because an unrepaired one can leave a patient with lasting complications. According to her lawyers, that did not happen here, and the injury went unrecognized. "These tears have to be repaired immediately or serious consequences can occur," her attorney said. The newborn was not hurt.

The woman and her husband sued her obstetrician and the hospital, and the case went to trial in Cook County Circuit Court. Her husband brought a separate claim for loss of consortium, the legal term for the strain the injury placed on their shared life and marriage. Her attorney, David R. Barry, Jr. of Corboy & Demetrio, argued that the long push toward a vaginal birth piled up the risk factors that produced the tear, and that the injury then slipped past the people who should have caught it. "I think what started out as a well-intentioned effort to get her to a vaginal delivery, over many hours, created multiple risk factors for a fourth-degree tear, and then when she suffered one, it was missed," Barry said.

The defense told the jury a different version. Its lawyers contended that the tear happened a day after the baby was born, not during the delivery itself, which would place it outside the care the plaintiff blamed. The trial ran six days before Judge Thomas J. Lipscomb.

The jury deliberated about two hours. On May 25, 2016, it returned a verdict for the plaintiff: $10 million for her injuries, plus an additional $1 million to her husband for loss of consortium, $11 million in all. The award covered the harm from the missed repair rather than any injury to the child, who was born healthy.