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 Jennifer Takhar, Carolyn Wilson-Nash, and Chloe He, BioNews | 06.22.2026
Aggregated News
Imagine wanting to have a child and discovering, at every stage, that the system was not designed with you in mind. This is the reality for many LGBTQ+ people in the UK who seek fertility treatment each year.
How much would you pay to be a parent? For years, Americans who turned to surrogacy could expect to spend about $100,000 on what the industry calls the “surrogacy journey.” For deep-pocketed intended parents—the term for those who plan to...
The Victorian government is introducing legislation it says will make IVF clinics safer and more accountable following high-profile bungles by private providers.
As part of the changes, the state's health minister will have the power to personally intervene to cancel...
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