$23.8m award in childbirth lawsuit

“Jurors took less than four hours Monday to find two Mass. General obstetricians negligent in the delivery in 1996 of Julia McLaughlin, who was born suffering from large bruises on her head and bleeding on the tissue around her brain.

Lawyers for the McLaughlins argued that the obstetricians, Mary Ames Castro and Alessandra Peccei, neglected Maria Lynn McLaughlin while she struggled to deliver her first child and failed to recognize that Julia’s head was tipped so that she could not fit through her mother’s pelvis. After 17 hours of labor, the lawyers charged, Ames Castro pulled the baby out with a vacuum extractor without telling the parents about the risk of brain damage.”