Most of a pregnancy's medical care is watching: screening for conditions in the mother, tracking the baby's growth and development, and acting when something looks wrong. The failures we see are rarely dramatic. A result comes back abnormal and nobody calls. A scan is misread. A condition is diagnosed and not treated.
These claims are sensitive, and we approach them that way. They are about the information a family was entitled to have and the care that should have followed, not about what anyone should have chosen.
What goes wrong in prenatal care
- Screening not offered where the history or risk factors called for it
- Results misread or mishandled, including laboratory and imaging errors
- Abnormal results never communicated to the parents or to the treating obstetrician, which is among the most common failures of all
- Maternal conditions untreated: preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, infection, Rh incompatibility and thyroid disease all have established management
- Growth restriction missed, where serial measurement should have shown a baby falling off the curve
- Fetal anomalies not detected on scans where they should reasonably have been visible
- Failure to refer to maternal-fetal medicine when the pregnancy was high risk
What follows a missed finding
The harm depends on what was missed:
- Untreated preeclampsia can progress and endanger both mother and baby, and it is one of the conditions most clearly established as requiring monitoring and management.
- Untreated infection can cause serious harm to a newborn, including brain injury from oxygen deprivation.
- Undetected growth restriction removes the chance to plan a safer delivery, including earlier delivery where indicated.
- Rh incompatibility left unmanaged has well-established consequences that routine treatment prevents.
- Missed anomalies remove the opportunity to prepare, to arrange delivery at an appropriate center, and to have specialist care ready at birth.
What Maryland law allows
Where negligent prenatal care caused an injury to the mother or the baby, that is a medical malpractice claim like any other, subject to the same requirements: a certificate from a qualifying expert, filing with the state health care dispute office, and proof that the failure caused the harm.
Claims framed around information rather than physical injury, where the argument is that accurate results would have changed decisions during the pregnancy, are treated differently from state to state and the law in this area is genuinely complex. We will tell you plainly what is available in Maryland for your situation rather than encouraging an expectation we cannot support.
How these claims are proven
- The prenatal record in full, including every scan report, laboratory result and the dates each was available.
- Communication records: what was sent to whom and when, which is often where the failure is visible.
- Specialist review by obstetrics, maternal-fetal medicine, radiology or laboratory medicine, depending on what failed.
- Causation evidence, showing what timely and accurate information would have changed about the care that followed.
Deadlines
Maryland malpractice claims generally run five years from the injury or three years from discovery, whichever comes first, and claims brought on behalf of a child follow their own rules that can extend the time available.
Prenatal failures are frequently identified long after birth, when a diagnosis prompts someone to look back through the pregnancy records. That is a normal way for these claims to start.
