The bizarre episode was at the center of lawsuits filed by three families that eventually reached the Alabama Supreme Court. On Friday, a panel of judges ruled that the embryos destroyed at the clinic should be considered children under state law, a decision that sent shock waves through the fertility industry and raised urgent questions about how treatments could possibly proceed in the state.
Yet the accident in the Alabama clinic echoes a pattern of serious errors that happen all too frequently during fertility treatment, a rapidly growing industry with little government oversight, experts say. From January 2009 through April 2019, patients brought more than 130 lawsuits over destroyed embryos, including cases where embryos were lost, mishandled or stored in freezer tanks that broke down.
Those errors have taken on new gravity as the anti-abortion movement aims to extend “personhood” to fetuses and embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization, arguing that they are “unborn children” and bringing cases to an increasingly polarized judiciary open to considering the idea.
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 01.13.2025
Aggregated News
Lisa Holligan already had two children when she decided to try for another baby. Her first two pregnancies had come easily. But for some unknown reason, the third didn’t. Holligan and her husband experienced miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage.
Mia used to say she’d never do in vitro fertilization. It’s a detail that feels significant now, looking back on the three long years that she and her husband, Chris, have spent trying to conceive. “When we first started trying...
The first time Jamie Cassidy was pregnant, the fetus had a genetic mutation so devastating that she and her husband, Brennan, decided to terminate in the second trimester. The next time they tried for a baby, they weren’t taking chances...
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