Obstetrics/Prenatal Care Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

October 16, 2022

U.S. sees shameful rise in ‘maternity care deserts,’ study finds

The national disgrace of expectant moms and infants suffering excessive, preventable injuries and death can’t be blamed on mysterious causes. Indeed, a leading advocacy group has put out yet another of its damning research studies, reporting on the disturbing increase in what it terms “maternity care deserts.”

The March of Dimes says it has analyzed data county by county to discover that too many areas of this country have “no hospitals providing obstetric care, no birth centers, no obstetrician/gynecologist, and no certified nurse midwives.”

The nonprofit organization classified an unacceptable number of counties “as having low access to maternity care services,” meaning they have “one or fewer hospitals offering OB service and fewer than 60 OB providers per 10,000 births, and the proportion of women without health insurance was 10 percent or greater.”

June 26, 2022

Momentous developments on abortion, guns, and Americans’ health

by Patrick A. Malone

Congress has passed a modest gun control law for the first time in three decades. The breakthrough, compromise measure, quickly signed by President Biden, not only provides for background checks for would-be weapons buyers younger than 21 and a push for states to pass laws to take guns away from the dangerous, it also provides a rare boost of tens of millions of dollars for desperately needed mental health services across the country.

But at the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court has upended New York’s long-standing restrictions on concealed weapons and the justices threw out a half century of established precedent in reversing Roe v. Wade.

In a blink, women’s reproductive health and their rights suffered a damaging blow, with medical experts, including the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine, condemning the high court’s allowing states to ban abortion, notably without allowing for exceptions for rape, incest, or when mothers’ lives are imperiled.

June 3, 2022

Baby formula mess shows big profits, a filthy plant, and bungled oversight

by Patrick A. Malone

The giant drug maker Abbott and the federal Food and Drug Administration both should hang their heads in shame as more information becomes public as to how they left millions of vulnerable infants hungry and put kids’ health at risk by wrongs involving the manufacture and distribution of a vital foodstuff — baby formula.

Millions of parents have gone into meltdown because of a nationwide shortage of the needed nutrient. It was sparked by the shutdown of Abbott’s formula-producing plant in Michigan, as well as the company’s product recall after babies got sick and died from infections involving Cronobacter sakazakii bacteria.

While Abbott has emphasized that experts have not conclusively linked the bacteria to its formula and the firm has played up its cooperation in a product recall, Robert Califf, the FDA’s chief and a doctor, ripped the company. He told a U.S. House subcommittee that agency inspectors found “egregiously unsanitary” conditions at the drug maker’s plant, the New York Times reported, quoting him, thusly:

May 20, 2022

Who trusts profit-grabbing companies to prevent perilous supply snafus?

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans keep suffering the dire consequences of corporations’ relentless pursuit of profits, their stifling of beneficial competition, and their failure to secure the production of their products. These now include desperately needed, specialized baby formula and contrast dyes used in diagnostic imaging studies for seriously ill and injured patients.

A special place in perdition needs to be reserved for those who have put infants at risk of hunger and illness by allowing the feeding crisis to explode and for boobs who are rushing in with finger-snapping, fact-light, and unworkable actions for parents to respond.

Let’s be clear that the formula mess, bad for all families across the country, hits hardest at the working poor and the poor. As the New York Times reported:

April 27, 2022

Cautions issued over prenatal genetic tests in IVF and for rare diseases

by Patrick A. Malone

Expectant parents, doctors, and regulators need to reconsider the rising use of gee-whiz genetic testing as doubts emerge about popular blood screenings to detect rare prenatal disorders and a costly test relied on by couples undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.

This is what the New York Times reported about what researchers have found about preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy, or PGT-A. It is an increasingly common screening in IVF and has led potential parents to discard embryos as unfeasible or unacceptable due to abnormalities to carry to term:

“PGT-A … has, over the last two decades, become a standard add-on to already pricey IVF procedures. But the test, which can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000, has become controversial over the years as studies have cast doubt on whether it increases birthrates from IVF at all. A growing number of scientists have questioned the widespread use of the test, which leads to tens of thousands of discarded embryos per year and causes many women to believe they may not be able to carry biological children. A new study published last week details 50 patients who underwent transfers of abnormal embryos at the Center for Human Reproduction in New York City … The study reported eight births after 57 transfer cycles of embryos with abnormal genetic testing results since 2015. Seven of the babies were born healthy. The average age of the women in the study was 41 years old.

March 2, 2022

Pandemic worsened already shameful U.S. maternal mortality problems

by Patrick A. Malone

The United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, has a really bad record on maternal mortality. And it only worsened during the coronavirus pandemic.

The National Center for Health Statistics found that 861 women died during pregnancy or shortly thereafter in 2020 versus the 754 comparable deaths in 2019, the New York Times reported, noting:

“The United States already has a much higher maternal mortality rate than other developed countries, and the increase in deaths pushes the nation’s maternal mortality rate to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2020 from 20.1 deaths in 2019. Maternal mortality rates in developed countries have in recent years ranged from fewer than two deaths per 100,000 live births in Norway and New Zealand to just below nine deaths per 100,000 live births in France and Canada.

May 25, 2021

Virginia Ob-gyn sentenced to 59 years in prison for harming patients and ripping off insurers

by Patrick A. Malone

A 70-year-old obstetrician-gynecologist likely will spend the rest of his life in jail. A federal judge sentenced Dr. Javaid Perwaiz to 59 years’ imprisonment for a decade-long spree of enriching himself by practicing costly, unneeded, and harmful medicine on women in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area.

As the Washington Post reported of the heinous acts that prosecutors proved at trial that Perwaiz committed:

“Several of [his] former patients testified that he performed procedures and surgeries they did not need — and that in some cases left them with permanent physical damage — so that he could collect their insurance money. Prosecutors said he gave his patients unnecessary, irreversible hysterectomies; improper sterilizations; and other procedures, including regular dilation and curettages that he called ‘annual cleanouts’ … The doctor would perform diagnostic procedures with broken equipment, prosecutors said, and scare patients into surgery by telling them they had cancer when they did not.”

January 22, 2021

A study finds black babies survive better when treated by black doctors

by Patrick A. Malone

A recent study of deaths among black infants may provide another conscience jab to medical leaders who are confronted with mounting evidence of racial health care disparities in the United States.

As the Washington Post reported, researchers examined records of 1.8 million Florida hospital births between 1992 and 2015, finding in their published study these stark results:

“Although black newborns are three times as likely to die as white newborns, when black babies were cared for by black doctors after birth — primarily pediatricians, neonatologists and family practitioners — their mortality rate was cut in half. They found an association, not a cause and effect, and the researchers said more studies are needed to understand what effect, if any, a doctor’s race might have on infant mortality. ‘Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases,’ the researchers wrote, ‘and when hospitals deliver more black newborns.’ They found no similar relationship between white doctors and white births. Nor did they find a difference in maternal death rates when the race of the doctor, usually an obstetrician, was the same as the mother’s.”

November 30, 2020

Heartfelt words from prominent moms on losing their pregnancies

by Patrick A. Malone

Two women with significant star power have opened up to the public about a rarely discussed experience — that, even in contemporary times, pregnancies do not all go well and that parents who lose a pre-term child suffer a shattering grief that others should recognize and seek to help them with.

It may be a sad symptom of social media and celebrity itself that controversy and criticism also has greeted the deeply personal disclosures by Chrissy Teigen, a superstar model, chef, and wife of acclaimed entertainer John Legend, and Meghan Markle, aka the Duchess of Sussex, and the American-born actress and biracial wife of Britain’s Prince Harry.

Markle wrote a heart-felt Op-Ed for the New York Times, describing the overpowering sadness she and her husband shared after she miscarried their second child:

November 20, 2020

Gynecologist guilty on U.S. charges, but questions linger about his practices

by Patrick A. Malone

A federal criminal case concluded with felony convictions for a Virginia gynecologist. But the questions are only now beginning as to how a doctor could have caused so many women so much harm for so long without other clinicians, hospitals, administrators, insurers, and regulators stepping in to stop him.

As the Washington Post reported, jurors took 2½ days to convict Dr. Javaid Perwaiz on 52 counts in what prosecutors alleged was his years of defrauding insurance companies by performing life-altering hysterectomies and other unneeded surgeries on women patients. He is scheduled to be sentenced in March, facing a maximum sentence of 465 years imprisonment.

His conduct, condemned and proven by prosecutors in a trial that ran for weeks, included “performing diagnostic procedures with broken equipment and scaring patients into surgery by falsely claiming they had cancer,” the newspaper reported, adding: