Court Rules Hospital Must Pay for a Brain-Damaged Child After a Refused Caesarean
A Guangxi hospital refused a woman's repeated requests for a caesarean, then could not produce the delivery records. A Chinese court treated the vanished data as proof of fault — and the ruling is now the story.
The request came from the patient herself, more than once: as her labor stalled in a delivery room in Dahua County, Guangxi, in July 2023, Wang asked the medical staff to switch her to a caesarean section. The staff said the time hadn't come yet, that the fetal monitor looked normal, and that she should keep trying to deliver vaginally. Hours later, her son was born without a cry, without breath, and in need of resuscitation. The severe asphyxia developed into cerebral palsy. He is now three years old: unable to sit, stand, or speak, and fed on liquid food.
That is the account her husband, surnamed Zhang, gave to reporters this week — and it has set off a discussion far beyond one county hospital, because the part that follows is about how China's courts handle medical disputes when the evidence goes missing.
When the family sued, the hospital was ordered to hand over the fetal-monitoring data from the delivery. The hospital first said the hard drive had failed during a May 2025 breakdown and the data was unrecoverable, according to a written explanation it submitted to the court. Weeks later, it said the data had been repaired and produced records that showed nothing abnormal. A third-party forensic institute concluded it could not verify the authenticity of the recovered data.
The court found that the hospital's own conduct — the loss, the sudden repair, the unverifiable records — fell under Article 1222 of China's Civil Code, which allows a court to presume fault when a hospital conceals, refuses to provide, or falsifies medical records. The first-instance court awarded the family about 420,000 yuan ($58,000) in full civil liability; a second court upheld the verdict; and the hospital has now asked the provincial high court for a retrial, which was accepted in August.
Under Chinese law, the burden of proving medical fault falls on the patient, but the patient doesn't hold the records — the hospital does. That is why Article 1222 exists: if a hospital can't produce the records, the court presumes the fault rather than leaving the patient with nothing. The ruling is the law working as designed, and it is also the reason the story has resonated: the family spent three years in litigation, and the turning point was not a medical expert's opinion but the hospital's own handling of its data.
The story has also revived a familiar anxiety about childbirth in China. One comment on Weibo accused hospitals of pushing vaginal birth to protect "natural delivery rate" targets and free up beds for the next birth — a claim with no evidence, but one that shows how little trust some patients have in the hospital's decision. Another comment asked the question underneath it: can you respect the mother's wishes?
In China, a caesarean is performed on medical indication, and a patient's request alone does not override the doctor's judgment — which is why the dispute turns on whether the doctors' judgment was negligent, not on whether the patient was heard. That is the difference between this case and the abortion-rights debates elsewhere: the question is not "who decides" but "who decides whether the doctor's decision was right."
The case lands amid a broader push to make childbirth less forbidding — the government has moved to make childbirth nearly free, from maternity wards to baby bonuses. The hospital has filed for a retrial. The child is three years old, and the records the court would have needed to judge the delivery are still in question.