Fertility clinic informs hundreds of patients their eggs may have been damaged

A long-established San Francisco fertility clinic experienced a liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank holding thousands of frozen eggs and embryos for future use, jeopardizing tissue hundreds of women had stored in hopes of having children.

The March 4 incident at Pacific Fertility Clinic, acknowledged Sunday by the facility’s president, followed a similar malfunction the same weekend at an unrelated clinic in Cleveland, the University Hospitals Fertility Center.

The two episodes carry powerful emotional and financial consequences, and come as the number of women freezing their eggs has soared in recent years. Although individual women have reported having frozen eggs damaged in storage or in transit, a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a major professional organization, said such large-scale incidents appear to be unprecedented.

“We can’t say definitively nothing like this has ever happened, but we are certainly not aware of anything,” said Sean Tipton, the association’s chief policy, advocacy and development officer. “Now that we have a second incident, it becomes very important that we learn as much as we can about both, to search...