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.
MUMBRA, India — The afternoon sun shines on the woman in a commuter-town café, highlighting her almond-shaped eyes and pale skin, a look often sought after by couples who need an egg to have a baby.
A growing body of contemporary research and reporting exposes how old ideas can find new life when repurposed within modern systems of medicine, technology, and public policy. Over the last decade, several trends have converged:
By Daphne O. Martschenko and Julia E. H. Brown, Hastings Bioethics Forum | 01.14.2026
Aggregated News
There is growing concern that falling fertility rates will lead to economic and demographic catastrophe. The social and political movement known as pronatalism looks to combat depopulation by encouraging people to have as many children as possible. But not just...
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