There’s a particular kind of silence that surrounds perineal injury after birth.
People ask about the baby. They rarely ask how the birth itself went for you — physically, in detail. Many mothers carry the effects of a severe tear for months or years without anyone outside their household ever really knowing. If you’re one of them, you are far from alone, and what you’re living with is not something you should have had to manage quietly.
This article is about one specific question: when does a perineal or pelvic floor injury cross from “a difficult thing that happened” into something worth a legal conversation?
How common is this, really?
Perineal tears are common in vaginal birth generally, and most heal without lasting effect. Third and fourth degree tears — sometimes called OASI injuries, short for obstetric anal sphincter injuries — are less common but far from rare. According to the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, around 3% of women who give birth vaginally experience one of these more severe tears.
These injuries can cause lasting symptoms: faecal or urinary incontinence, chronic pelvic pain, and pain during intercourse (dyspareunia) that may persist well beyond the initial recovery period. None of this is something you’re expected to simply accept as an unavoidable cost of childbirth.
Where the legal question actually sits
Not every tear — even a severe one — points to a legal claim. The question isn’t whether the injury was serious. It’s whether the clinical management around it met the standard of care you were entitled to. That can include:
- Whether the risk of a severe tear was properly discussed with you beforehand
- Whether the tear should have been avoided or prevented by alternative treatment
- Whether the tear was identified promptly after delivery
- Whether it was repaired correctly, by an appropriately trained clinician, in a timely way
- Whether appropriate follow-up care was offered once symptoms became apparent
If a tear wasn’t identified when it should have been, wasn’t repaired to a proper standard, or wasn’t followed up appropriately once you reported ongoing symptoms, that failure may be more than an unfortunate outcome — it may be something the law recognises as negligence.
You don’t have to justify how bad it was
A lot of women tell us some version of the same thing: “I wasn’t sure if what happened to me was bad enough to do anything about.”
If you’re asking that question, it’s worth having a conversation. You don’t need to have decided in advance that your experience clears some invisible bar. That’s exactly what a proper assessment is for — and sometimes the honest answer is that there isn’t a viable claim. We tell families that too, because we think that honesty matters more than pursuing something that doesn’t hold up.
You can read more about how this fits into the wider picture on our maternal birth injury page, or look at how we approach third degree and fourth degree tear claims specifically, or more broadly at pelvic floor injury claims.
Support beyond the legal question
Whatever you decide about pursuing a claim, the physical and psychological impact of a severe perineal injury deserves proper support in its own right. Birth Trauma Australia offers information and peer support specifically for women recovering from birth trauma, including physical injuries like OASI. We’d encourage you to reach out to them, or to your GP or pelvic health physiotherapist, regardless of whether you choose to speak with us about the legal side of things.
Where to from here
If any part of this resonates — the tear that wasn’t explained properly beforehand, the follow-up that never came, the symptoms nobody warned you might persist — it’s worth a conversation. You can book a confidential, no-obligation assessment with our team. There’s no cost for that first call, and no obligation to proceed afterward.
