For lawyers who represent birth malpractice victims, few phrases conjure up as much ire and frustration as “the ACOG report,” the shorthand for a 2003 document put out by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (“ACOG”) called “Neonatal Encephalopathy and Cerebral Palsy: Defining the Pathogenesis.” Despite its title, the report made no effort to explain how a doctor could determine the cause of a particular child’s cerebral palsy, and it made no effort to explain how the incident of neonatal encephalopathy (i.e., newborn brain damage) could be reduced. (Bob Schuster has a little more on its origins, and MedScape has a summary of it.)

Rather, the sole purpose of the report was to prevent children with cerebral palsy caused by labor and delivery malpractice from obtaining compensation, which it accomplished by giving a cover to insurance company’s efforts to confuse judges and juries into believing that babies could survive hours without adequate oxygen and suffer no consequences. The report established core four “essential” criteria, and five “suggestive” criteria that, ACOG claimed, had to be met before a child’s cerebral palsy could be linked to hypoxia at birth.

Sure, in the “Task Force on Neonatal Encephalopathy and Cerebral Palsy,” ACOG dressed up their preordained conclusions in scientific and medical jargon and gave passing nods to basic principles of honest medical research, but the report was worthless from a medical standpoint. It wasn’t a real compilation of medical information, like a Cochrane Review or UpToDate, and it didn’t give any recommendations on how to diagnose or treat patients.

Instead, the report was used constantly in birth injury litigation by paid experts testifying on behalf of obstetricians and hospitals sued for ignoring the signs and symptoms of fetal distress and failing to treat fetal hypoxia. If you brought a hypoxia birth injury claim anywhere in the United States after 2003, you could be assured that the ACOG report would be front and center in the defense, with the veneer of “scientific” and “medical” proof.

ACOG wasn’t responsible for coming up with most of the “essential” and “suggestive” criteria, but instead cut-and-pasted them from the International Cerebral Palsy Task Force’s 1999 “template for defining a causal relation between acute intrapartum events and cerebral palsy,” available here. You can see a comparison of the ACOG and International guidelines on table 3 of this article.

The International Task Force’s criteria was suspiciously strict to begin with, like with their criteria for blood pH and Apgar scores. 
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