Aggregated News
Malissa Pineda was lying on her living room couch when her cellphone rang.
The caller’s voice sounded calm but insistent. It was her fertility doctor. “I need you to come into the office right away,” she remembers him saying.
This struck Pineda as strange, because two days earlier, he had put her on bed rest to improve the chances that her in vitro fertilization would take.
A half-hour later, Pineda and her husband, David, arrived at the Pacific Reproductive Center in Torrance, California. They met with Dr. Rifaat Salem, the medical director, and the clinic’s embryologist, Sandra Arias, who looked like she had been crying.
There’s been an issue, Salem said.
Over the course of his 30-year career, Salem had performed one miracle after another. Four years earlier, he’d done the same for Pineda when her daughter Piper Joy was born. His clinic boasts one of the highest IVF success rates in the country.
But, as Pineda would learn, a lot can be hidden behind an impressive success rate.
That day in the clinic’s conference room, Salem let his embryologist...
