Video Transcript
The most common cause of birth injury is failure to timely deliver the child when the fetal tracings are indicating that the child is running out of reserves. That’s the common terminology you will hear between the healthcare providers. That could be because the placenta is failing, and that could be due to earlier pregnancy complications or simply because a woman is over her due date. It could be that the child is just struggling, and the fetal tracings will give you all of that information, whether they’re variable decelerations, late decelerations, or something else. An additional birth complication can be a shoulder dystocia, which is when the child’s shoulder, the upper shoulder that is closest to the mom’s pubic symphysis bone, gets lodged and stuck. If that shoulder gets stuck, the child is literally hung in the birth canal in a position that is breathing is also being compressed. So a common injury from a shoulder dystocia that people are used to seeing because it’s visible and you can see it is a brachial plexus injury, also called an Erb’s palsy, where the child’s arm is just paralyzed either from the shoulder down or in portions from the shoulder down. Even if the shoulder dystocia is relieved without causing the brachial plexus injury, if the child is lodged in the birth canal without oxygen for a sufficient period of time, that could still result in a brain injury or a brain insult so severe that it causes death.