One hundred and eleven couples have sued a clinic in California so far, saying that the staff harmed their embryos in what they called a “toxic incubator” and then put the eggs into the patients anyway.
The people who work at the Tennessee-based clinic Ovation in Newport Beach said they cleaned the incubator with hydrogen peroxide instead of their normal solution. Peroxide was used to make an incubator that was harmful to the embryos. Despite this, the embryos were still placed in patients over the course of a week, but none of those patients became pregnant. According to Ovation, they knew there was a problem when none of their patients got better.
Adam Wolf, one of the lawyers in the case, said, “My clients are devastated by Ovation’s serious error.” He went on, “For some victims, this was their last chance to have a child with someone they were related to biologically.”
Wolf said, “We want to know what happened and how it happened, and they want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Wolf and another lawyer filed the first cases around the middle of April. However, the Orange County Superior Court was also given a case from nine other couples who were also badly hurt. Wolf says that the clinic is also being sued six other times.
The plaintiffs are suing for things like medical battery, negligence, and intentional representation, and they want a jury hearing. They say the clinic didn’t train their workers well enough and lied about how healthy the embryos were before they were implanted.
And while in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is becoming more popular, there have been a lot of problems with it. For example, doctors have put their own sperm into patients or patients have been put with the wrong eggs.
Wolf said, “In almost all of those cases, the problem is caused by human error.” “Those mistakes would happen a lot less often if the fertility industry was properly regulated and watched over.”
