Aggregated News
Before fertility patients begin the long journey through hormone treatments, egg retrieval, fertilization and — hopefully, if everything goes well — a baby, there’s the paperwork. As a first order of business, would-be parents are typically presented with a form that requires them to choose the fate of embryos they do not use in the course of building their families. Three couples — the LePages, the Fondes and the Aysennes — undergoing treatments from 2013 to 2016 at the Center for Reproductive Medicine in Mobile, Ala., filled out such contracts.
The clinic later said that one family chose to donate any remaining embryos to scientific research, another decided to destroy any embryos that were frozen after five years, and a third said any embryos deemed not suitable for reproductive purposes could be used for research and eventually disposed of. It was not clear, in other words, that these families intended for all of their embryos to be born.
Ultimately, though, their preferences were moot. In December 2020 a hospital patient wandered into an unsecured room where the couples’ embryos sat...