$6.2 Million Settlement for Mother Who Suffered Brain Damage at 24 Weeks of Pregnancy

A pregnant New York City woman was 24 weeks into her term when the care she received from her obstetrician and the hospital she relied on went wrong in ways that caused her catastrophic, permanent brain damage. Brain damage at that severity is not a recoverable injury. It changes the course of a person's life entirely, demanding care and accommodation that stretch indefinitely into the future. Her family brought the case to Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum PC.

The firm pursued claims against both the OB/GYN and the hospital. The allegations fell across several overlapping categories: birth injury, failure to diagnose, failure to treat, hospital malpractice, and professional negligence. Cases of this kind require the plaintiff to trace what the clinical record shows about what was known, when it was known, and what the treating team did or failed to do in response.

At 24 weeks of pregnancy, an emerging complication can become catastrophic if missed or mishandled. The standard of care in obstetric medicine requires the treating physician and hospital staff to monitor for warning signs, correctly identify what those signs indicate, and intervene appropriately. The firm's position was that neither the OB/GYN nor the hospital met that standard, and that the failures allowed the mother's condition to deteriorate to the point of severe neurological injury.

Attorney Matthew T. Gammons, then at Rosenbaum & Rosenbaum PC, led the case for the family. Proving causation in an obstetric malpractice matter means building a record, typically through medical expert testimony, that connects the specific clinical decisions to the resulting harm. Both the physician and the institution were named as defendants, which the evidence supported given that obstetric care is a shared responsibility between the attending provider and the hospital systems around them.

The parties reached a settlement in 2017. The amount was $6.2 million. TopVerdict ranked that outcome 24th on its annual list of the top 100 settlements across all practice areas in New York for 2017, placing it among the larger medical malpractice resolutions the state saw that year.