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 Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 05.06.2024
Aggregated News
It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held...
By Osagie K. Obasogie, L.A. Review of Books | 04.17.2024
Aggregated News
When Robert G. Edwards won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 for developing in vitro fertilization (IVF) decades earlier in 1978, many members of the scientific community sighed in relief. This honor, they felt, was long...
“It hurt,” my friend told me. “They don’t tell you that it hurts.”
Her voice came heavy through my headphones as I scrubbed the dinner dishes. “Like, I could feel the needle going through all the layers—skin, fat, muscle—and I could...
Amy Yin always envisioned having at least two daughters. She spent her 20s working as an engineer and founding a startup in San Francisco. When she wasn’t working, vacationing with friends, and spoiling her cats, Amy dedicated herself to...
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