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.
President Trump scored a bunch of generally favorable mainstream headlines recently by announcing that he was ordering expanded access to in vitro fertilization (IVF). He had announced in October that he was “the father of IVF” although he also said he had only just learned what it was from Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), who explained it to him over the phone. “And within about two minutes, I understood it.”
The executive order, as reporter Susan Rinkunas wryly noted at...
One of the greatest scandals in modern science began with a late-2010s advertisement for HIV-positive couples looking to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). The ad had been put out by a scientist named He Jiankui, a biologist then at...
By Blene Woldeselasse, Humans Rights Research Center | 02.18.2025
Aggregated News
Three Thai women have been rescued from a human egg trafficking operation in Georgia, run by a Chinese human trafficking syndicate. One of the victims, speaking anonymously at a press conference, revealed how she was deceived by an online job...
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