Edwards’ law legacy lasting

The influence of former trial lawyer and twice-failed presidential aspirant John Edwards radiates still like a noxious gas, the fumes extending beyond his native North Carolina, and his home covering 40,000 square feet of that state, to, of all places, Waynesboro. The University of Virginia Health Services Foundation, the operational arm of the medical center, signed a settlement Wednesday agreeing to pay a city couple $1.3 million to end a negligence suit filed over their son’s cerebral palsy.
A Richmond-based law firm representing David and Elizabeth Morris claimed that medical center doctors failed to deliver the child expediently enough, causing irreversible brain damage.
Edwards popularized that argument more than two decades ago in a materially distinguished legal career in which he won more than $60 million in some 20 cerebral palsy cases. Combining flimsy science and Hallmark theater, Edwards famously played before a jury the role of unborn child pleading for release from an oxygen-starved womb.
“ ‘I need out,’ ” he declared as the channeled voice of an infant. Careless doctors callously ignored the plea, failing to perform an immediate Caesarean section, Edwards explained. So the child, in the person of Edwards, turned to the jury for an immediate $6.5 million. “She speaks to me through you,” he pleaded. “She’s inside me, and she’s talking to you.”
Victory in that case established Edwards as a trial lawyer with whom not to reckon, leading to a string of multimillion-dollar settlements. It also set in motion a series of trends that, in some manner, touch almost everyone.
n Other lawyers, such as those representing the Morrises, picked up the precedent and sprinted to scores of legal wins, snaring more than $100 million in jury awards in some cases.
n Doctors began performing Caesarean-sections at the slightest hint of fetal distress, driving up the rate of the procedure from 6 percent in 1970 to more than 25 percent today.
n Malpractice premiums soared, and, with them, the cost of health care and insurance to cover it.
Here’s the rub: The rate of children born with cerebral palsy has not dropped. In fact, in some places, the rate has increased. Studies show that palsy is predominantly related to fetal brain injury incurred long before the onset of labor. A 2003 study of 1,000 palsy cases published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that “delivery mode (whether vaginal or cesarean [sic] delivery) was not associated with any of the outcomes that were evaluated.”
While driving up costs and failing to reduce palsy rates, Edwards’ C-section revolution also heightened risk for mothers. Those who undergo the procedure are three times more likely to die shortly after childbirth, according to a 2006 study.
Appropriately, during his second, fleeting campaign for president, Edwards was a proponent of universal health care. So too are his Democratic contemporaries, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Edwards’ case is one in which a source of the problem proffers a solution.
When consultation is needed on building homes of size comparable to warehouses, Edwards should be first on the call list. On the subject of health care, forgive us if we forgo his guidance.