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The painful cost paid when IVF treatment fails due to corporate negligence

by: Kristen M. Hermiz

Anyone who has gone through the process of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), or who knows a friend or family member who has gone through IVF, will likely agree that it is a long and emotional journey even in the best of circumstances. 

Arriving at the door of a fertility clinic means you have spent months or years attempting to conceive a child to no avail. The IVF process itself is time consuming, expensive, invasive, and emotionally draining. A patient undergoes weeks of medical testing, injections, and surgery to retrieve healthy eggs (if any). Then the seemingly endless waiting begins—wondering whether the process has resulted in any viable embryos. Perhaps the hardest part is that there is no guarantee that this will result in a healthy embryo and ultimately, a child.

Now imagine undergoing IVF and hearing the great news from your doctor—they were able to retrieve healthy eggs from your egg retrieval procedure.

Your elation and a hope for a child are short-lived however, when you are informed that none of your potential embryos survived the five-to-seven-day laboratory culture process in which embryos are created. You may blame yourself. You wonder whether it was something you did, something you didn’t do, something you ate. The list goes on.

In a twist of events, you later learn that the embryo culture fluid used to help develop your embryos may have been defective.

This scenario could be the devastating reality for perhaps tens of thousands of patients throughout the country who underwent IVF in or around December of 2023, and whose laboratory unknowingly used an allegedly defective embryo culture media manufactured by CooperSurgical. Three lots of this media were allegedly missing magnesium, a key nutrient for embryo development. No embryo could develop without those nutrients during the culture process.

If you or a loved one has experienced embryo loss in or around the fall and/or winter of 2023, do not lose hope. Review the FDA recall notice to see whether the embryo media culture used by your fertility clinic during your embryo development was part of CooperSurgical’s IVF fluid recall. Having this information can help you understand why you may have had an unsuccessful IVF treatment and can lead to important conversations with your physicians so that it won’t happen again in the future.