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.
Two years ago, we devoted an entire issue to the rise of the American oligarchy. Since then, our oligarchic system has become more entrenched and pervasive, revolving around a small crew of tech titans whose quest for wealth and...
By Alfonso Martinez Arias, Nicolas Rivron, and Naomi Moris, BioNews | 04.20.2026
Aggregated News
The ability of pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into different cell types has enabled the creation of stem-cell-based embryo models (SCBEMs), which have the potential to illuminate the early stages of embryo development and implantation. SCBEMs hold promise as...
New regulations in sperm donation are being implemented by Belgium's Federal Agency for Medicines and Health Products (FAMHP), following revelations regarding the use of sperm carrying a cancer-causing mutation, and widespread breaches of donor limits.
A STARTUP OUT of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the sperm to make visibly healthy-looking embryos. The technique could eventually help men with certain types of infertility have biological children...
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