Oregon Family Files Cerebral Palsy Birth Injury Lawsuit

Six-year-old Maverick Ramseyer has cerebral palsy (CP), a neurological condition that impairs gross and fine motor functions. Maverick’s parents are blaming his condition on preventable birth injuries that Maverick sustained at the Oregon-based Silverton Hospital—and they’re taking their case to court, claiming Maverick’s CP is due to medical negligence and malpractice on the part of three doctors, two birth clinics and the hospital involved in Maverick’s prenatal and post-natal care. If found guilty, the defendants could have to pay $40 million in economic and non-economic damages.

Alleged malpractice in pregnancy and delivery

As Maverick’s mother Elizabeth Ramseyer recalls, her pregnancy seemed a healthy one, with nothing out of the ordinary to forewarn her of what was to come in birth. She also contends that her doctors made no effort to warn her of any possible birth complications peculiar to her pregnancy—this despite the conclusion one obstetrician made (in hindsight) that medical staff should have foreseen that Maverick ought not be vaginally delivered.

“It sounds like that this whole clinical situation was one where, perhaps, the baby was never destined to be delivered vaginally, and maybe that was why mom was two weeks overdue,” Dr. James Cross said, in an article in The Statesman.

Maverick, after all, was 15 days overdue by the time his mother was induced. Only 11 hours after induction—by the time Elizabeth had begun to push, and as Maverick’s heart rate dropped to 60 beats per minutes for about 6 minutes—only then was it discovered that Maverick’s head was not positioned at the cervix and that Maverick would require an emergency C-section.

Upon delivery, Maverick was found to be not breathing, apparently having swallowed some of his own fecal matter (meconium). Attempts to resuscitate followed, with a mobile team from Oregon Health & Science University shuttled in to stabilize Maverick and transport him to a neonatal intensive care unite. Not long after, the Ramseyers would learn that their son had suffered brain damage affecting up to 20 percent of his brain due to oxygen deprivation.

Two years later, they would learn Maverick’s diagnosis of cerebral palsy.

The Ramseyers contend that the hospital staff never made them aware of just how serious Maverick’s condition was during the birthing process.

“There was no sense of anything being wrong,” Derrick Ramseyer, Maverick’s father, has said of the entire birthing process, from induction to C-section. Only after a nurse had whisked Maverick out of the room before Derrick had realized, did a nurse explain Maverick was having trouble breathing.

Filing a cerebral palsy lawsuit

The Ramseyers chose to find a birth injury lawyer and file a cerebral palsy lawsuit after doing more research on the Interent, which unearthed the insight that oxygen deprivation at birth accounts for 5 to 10 percent of cerebral palsy cases.

Some 800,000 children and adults in this country have cerebral palsy.

In the meantime, Maverick Ramseyer will live with CP for the rest of his life. Currently, he sees speech, occupational and physical therapists each week, and each month, his parents incur $500 in medical bills in addition to maxing out their insurance plans.

“If there was somebody or something that needed to be held accountable to their actions that could potentially help with what we foresee with the lifetime of treatment, we wanted to be able to have that accountability there and help with the future to come,” Maverick’s father says. “Because we didn’t know what to expect.