Baby decapitated after doctor ‘chose wrong delivery method’

A baby was decapitated after a doctor chose the wrong method to try to deliver him, a medical tribunal has found.

Dr Vaishnavy Vilvanathan Laxman failed to perform an emergency caesarean section and instead proceeded with a regular delivery, a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service panel said in a report.

This was despite the baby – known as Baby B – being feet first in the breech position, having a prolapsed cord and low heart rate, and the mother’s cervix being less than 4cm dilated.

The panel found the decision to proceed with a vaginal delivery “set in train a course of events which ultimately resulted in the decapitation of Baby B”.

It added: “But for Dr Vilvanathan Laxman’s error of judgment in this regard, the decapitation would not have occurred.”

Laxman was a consultant at Ninewells hospital in Dundee when she was called to assist with a 30-year-old first-time mother, known as Patient A, who was 25 weeks pregnant in March 2014.

The tribunal said the mother was taken to theatre and, given the complications, “the only appropriate course in these circumstances was a caesarean section which would have been the quickest mode of delivery given the risks attendant upon a vaginal delivery, namely head entrapment, which would inevitably have delayed the birth”.

The tribunal ruled that the baby died before the decapitation.

A pathologist told the tribunal that the damage to the baby’s neck and decapitation “would most likely be attributed to the pulling and stretching forces applied to Baby B’s body during attempts to deliver the head”.

In Patient A’s evidence, given while clutching two teddy bears, she told the tribunal she had previously been told because her baby was in breech it would be delivered by caesarean section “if anything happened”.

She said: “I was not given gas and air – I was in pain. I had the doctors putting their hands inside me and I had them pushing on my stomach and then pulling me down.

“I tried to get off the bed but they pulled me back three times and just said they had to get the baby out. They twice tried to cut my cervix and nobody told me they were going to do it. There was no anaesthetic. I said to them ‘it doesn’t feel right, stop it, what’s going on, I don’t want to do it’, but nobody responded to me in any way.”

The tribunal will later make a decision on whether Laxman’s fitness to practice is impaired or not.