Cook County Jury Awards $19.2 Million to Parents Whose Newborn Died of Meconium Aspiration After Labor Was Pushed On With Pitocin Instead of a Cesarean
After trial: We found no Illinois Appellate Court decision in Estate of Padilla v. Porto and no public report of post-trial motions, a remittitur or a settlement after the verdict. Cook County verdicts of this size against hospital defendants are often resolved post-trial; we could not confirm whether the judgment was paid in full. Illinois has had no cap on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases since Lebron v. Gottlieb Memorial Hospital (2010), so no statutory reduction applies.
Won by Schwartz Jambois.
A woman 39 weeks pregnant with her first child arrived at MacNeal Hospital in labor. Eleven hours in, the fetal heart tracing showed distress and meconium appeared in the amniotic fluid, but the obstetrician let labor run another four and a half hours and gave Pitocin to speed it up even as the baby's heart rate decelerated. The newborn girl aspirated meconium, suffered lung damage and respiratory failure, and died 18 days later. In 2018 a Cook County jury returned a $19,217,602 verdict against the obstetrician, a nurse and the hospital in Estate of Padilla v. Porto, No. 13 L 6693, tried by Craig Mannarino and Amanda Brasfield. TopVerdict ranked it the tenth-largest Illinois verdict of 2018.
What happened
The couple were expecting their first child. At 39 weeks the mother went into labor and was admitted to MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, just west of Chicago, under the care of an obstetrician, Dr. Porto, the lead defendant in the case that followed. For the first several hours nothing was out of the ordinary.
About eleven hours into labor the picture changed. The fetal heart rate tracing began to show signs of distress, and staff noted meconium in the amniotic fluid, the newborn's first stool passed in the womb, which is itself a sign of fetal stress and which a baby can inhale into the lungs before or during delivery. Those two findings together are the point at which an obstetrician has to decide whether the baby can safely tolerate more labor or should be delivered by cesarean section.
The obstetrician let labor continue for another four and a half hours. To move it along, the team started Pitocin, the synthetic oxytocin used to induce or strengthen contractions. Stronger contractions put more stress on a baby who is already struggling. Fetal heart rate decelerations appeared after the drug was started, and the Pitocin was continued anyway.
The baby girl was eventually delivered, but she had inhaled meconium. Meconium aspiration syndrome inflames and obstructs a newborn's airways, and in her case it caused lung damage and respiratory failure. She lived 18 days.
Her parents sued the obstetrician, a labor and delivery nurse and MacNeal Hospital in the Circuit Court of Cook County in 2013, in a case captioned Estate of Padilla v. Porto, et al., No. 13 L 6693. Craig Mannarino and Amanda Brasfield of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz, now Schwartz Jambois, tried it. Their argument was that once distress and meconium were both present, the standard of care called for a cesarean, not for a drug that would drive harder contractions into a baby who was already showing she could not tolerate the ones she had. The defense contested that the delivery decisions caused the death.
In 2018 the jury returned a verdict for the estate of $19,217,602. TopVerdict, which compiles the largest verdicts in each state from public reports, listed Estate of Padilla v. MacNeal Hospital as the tenth-largest verdict in Illinois that year, crediting Craig P. Mannarino of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz for the plaintiff. The firm also announced the result and the ranking. We found no appellate decision in the case and no public report of a post-trial reduction or settlement.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.TopVerdict.com, Top 20 Verdicts in Illinois in 2018: No. 10, $19,217,602, Estate of Padilla v. MacNeal Hospital, et al., wrongful death and obstetric malpractice, plaintiff attorney Craig P. Mannarino of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz
- 2.PRWeb press release, November 5, 2019: case name Estate of Padilla v. Porto, et al., Case No. 13 L 6693, Cook County, $19,217,602 verdict, 39-week labor, meconium and fetal distress, Pitocin given instead of a cesarean, defendants a doctor, a nurse and the hospital, attorneys Craig Mannarino and Amanda Brasfield of Kralovec, Jambois & Schwartz
- 3.Schwartz Jambois (firm)
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