IVF Patients Say a Test Caused Them to Discard Embryos. Now They’re Suing
By Jamie Ducharme,
TIME
| 03. 06. 2025
After struggling for eight years to have a baby, Shannon Petersen and her husband decided to try in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2022. Their fertility doctor recommended a test that sounded like exactly what they needed. It promised to help Petersen, then 42, avoid miscarriages and get pregnant faster by determining which of the couple’s embryos were most likely to result in a healthy baby. The testing cost thousands of dollars and wasn’t covered by insurance, but it was advertised as close to 100% accurate and strongly recommended for women of Petersen’s age. “I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds amazing,’” she says. “Who wouldn’t?”
Her mood changed when the results came back. The test deemed each of the Petersens’ five embryos abnormal, meaning their clinic—like many in the industry—refused to use any of them. “It was like, ‘Well, better luck next time. These are garbage, essentially,’” Petersen says. “It was heartbreaking.”
The Petersens took out a $15,000 loan to try again. Their second IVF cycle yielded only one embryo, which they decided not to test; it did not result in a...
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By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...
By Marianne Lamers, NEMO Kennislink [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.23.2025
Een rijtje gespreide vulva’s gaapt de bezoeker aan. Zó ziet een bevalling eruit, en zó een baarmoeder met foetus. Een zwangerschap, maar dan zonder zwangere vrouw, gestript van zorgen, gêne en pijn. De zwangerschapsmodellen en oefenbekkens, te zien in de...