Seattle nurse gave flu shot instead of birth control; now judge has awarded $10M for severely disabled child’s care – By Mike Carter (Seattle Times) / Nov 17 2020
A federal judge has awarded just over $10 million toward the future care of a severely disabled child born because a nurse at a Seattle community clinic negligently gave the mother a flu shot instead of her quarterly birth-control injection.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik awarded the child, identified in court documents by the initials “SLP,” a total of $7.5 million for the girl’s “extraordinary medical, educational and similar expenses” that will accrue throughout her life.
The judge last week awarded $1.5 million to the child’s mother, Yesenia Pacheco, and $1 million to the father, Luis Lemus, to “compensate for mental anguish and emotional stress” as a result of the unwanted pregnancy. The family received an additional $42,294 to compensate for two Medicaid liens, according to court documents.
“This has been a hard-fought battle” that lasted eight years while the government refused to take responsibility for the negligence of a nurse at a federally funded clinic, said Seattle attorneys Mike Maxwell and Steve Alvarez, who represented the family in what’s described in court documents as a “wrongful pregnancy … wrongful life” case. The lawsuit was filed in 2015, three years after SLP was born.
