$16 Million Verdict After Doctors Delayed a C-Section for 30 Hours Despite Signs of Fetal Distress
After trial: No public reporting confirms whether the verdict has been appealed.
A Spartanburg County jury awarded Dara Robinson $16 million against Spartanburg & Pelham OBGYN and three of its physicians after they delayed a cesarean delivery for roughly 30 hours despite fetal monitoring showing signs of distress, and her son died shortly after birth.
What happened
Dara Robinson learned in April 2019 that she was expecting a son. As the pregnancy progressed, her care team noted two things that mattered later: her blood sugar was running elevated, and the fetus was measuring large for its gestational age. Both are recognized risk factors that call for closer monitoring as a pregnancy nears term.
On December 17, 2019, Robinson went to the hospital reporting decreased fetal movement, itself a warning sign that prompts monitoring to check on the baby's condition. The fetal heart rate monitoring that followed came back indeterminate, not reassuring, and the amniotic fluid showed meconium, a sign that can indicate the fetus is under stress. Taken together, the picture available to her physicians was not a normal one.
What her lawsuit alleged happened next was a delay. Rather than proceeding to a cesarean delivery promptly once these signs appeared, physicians at Spartanburg & Pelham OBGYN continued to monitor and wait, for approximately 30 hours, as the concerning readings persisted. Robinson's attorneys later described the delay to the jury as physicians agonizing over when to act despite fetal monitoring strips that called for a different answer. After midnight on December 19, more than a day after the warning signs first appeared, the fetal heart rate dropped sharply. Physicians moved to an emergency cesarean section, but the delivery came too late. The infant died shortly after birth.
Robinson, as personal representative of her son's estate, sued the practice and three of the physicians who managed her labor and delivery in Spartanburg County Circuit Court. The case turned on a narrow but consequential medical judgment: at what point the monitoring data required moving to surgery rather than continuing to observe, and whether a 30-hour delay in the face of indeterminate heart rate tracings and meconium fell below the standard of care owed to a full-term pregnancy already flagged as high-risk.
Ashley Creech led the trial team for the family, working with Zachary Hayden, Amanda Pittman, and Anna Magann of McGowan, Hood, Felder & Phillips. On March 5, 2025, after trial before Judge Derham Cole Jr., the jury returned a $16 million verdict against the practice and the three named physicians.
The case is one of a recurring category in obstetric malpractice litigation: not a single dramatic error but a slow accumulation of concerning signs met with continued observation rather than a decision to deliver, until the point where waiting is no longer an option a physician gets to make. No public reporting confirms whether the defendants have appealed the verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from McGowan, Hood, Felder & Phillips, LLC
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Seletha Gartrell, 54, of Aiken, arrived at Aiken Regional Medical Centers on December 6, 2012 with severe sepsis and was not given the antibiotics her doctors ordered for roughly 14 hours; she went into septic shock, suffered a cardiac arrest, and lost both legs above the knee, her left arm below the elbow, and fingers on her right hand. In March 2017 an Aiken County jury found the hospital negligent and awarded her $13.75 million, made up of $10 million in economic damages and $3.75 million in non-economic damages. The hospital publicly disagreed with the verdict, and no appeal or later reduction appears in any public record we could find.
Vernon Sulton, paralyzed by gunshot wounds he suffered as a bystander to an armed robbery, was admitted to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital in Columbia with a stage two pressure ulcer on his sacrum; in the 11 days he stayed there it deepened to stage four, requiring a colostomy and skin-graft surgery. A Richland County jury found the hospital and six of its nurses negligent, awarding $306,693.25 to his estate, $4 million to his wife for loss of consortium, and $8 million in punitive damages against HealthSouth. On November 21, 2012 the South Carolina Supreme Court reversed the entire verdict and ordered a new trial, holding that the trial judge had wrongly instructed the jury that the hospital owed a heightened duty of care. What happened after the remand is not in any public record we could find.
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