Posted on 03/05/2007 8:25:52 PM PST by Calpernia
NEW YORK (AP) -- Two women have sued a reproductive bank for $3 million, claiming the frozen storage facility lost their embryos.
Cathy L. Berger and Adriana Pacheco of Hoboken, N.J., said in court papers they gave Repro Lab Inc. six embryos to store in September 2003. The pair said they had signed a contract to store the tissues there.
The couple tried to collect the frozen embryos, created with eggs from Pacheco, in March 2006 after Berger began medical preparation for implantation, according to court papers.
But the Manhattan-based Repro told the couple: "The aforesaid embryos were missing, could not be found, and had been lost,'' court papers said.
Berger and Pacheco said in their lawsuit, filed Friday in Manhattan's state Supreme Court, the "careless, unskillful, negligent'' loss of their "irreplaceable property'' had caused them "pain, injury, mental anguish and emotional distress.''
The lawsuit also asks for unspecified punitive damages.
A woman who answered the telephone at Repro's office said no one at the facility would have any comment on the lawsuit.
The couple's lawyer, Susan Dennehy, declined to comment.
I hate the word property being used.
The lab probably sold the embryos for research, then told the hapless couples that they couldn't find their embryos.
Many tissues sent to labs have to be destroyed by law after a certain period.
Perhaps they were only complying with such regulations, or mistakenly believed that they were.
The couple tried to collect the frozen embryos, created with eggs from Pacheco, in March 2006 after Berger began medical preparation for implantation, according to court papers.
Lesbians sad over the loss of their "property"--nuff said.
Good baby sitters are so hard to find.
Its ok to kill them just not lose them. Backasswards
For purposes of the lawsuit, these women might be willing to take the position that the "property" is more than property. If they declare the "tissue" to have been babies, the case gets a whole lot more interesting.
Why weren't their embryos in their wombs where they belonged?
Best guess? They had done a successful IVF cycle/s, and decided to have siblings for the first child/ren a few years later.
Harvesting the ova for the conceptions is no casual exercise ... I don't doubt she is angry. But commoditizing humans has its downside don'tchaknow.
Ghastly.
If Cathy and Adriana would have married men, maybe they and their lost children wouldn't be in this predicament today. They shouldn't have waited almost 4 years to do this procedure.
I'm sure these women signed a standard agreement that limited the clinic's liability for loss of or damage to the embryos, and they won't collect a penny more via a court proceeding. Bad publicity for the clinic, though -- prospective patients like to think the storage tracking system is pretty precise and reliable. The women may be hoping to get an out of court settlement from the clinic in excess of what they're contractually entitled to. The clinic might bend some to shut them up and get the court proceeding cancelled, but not to the tune of $3 million.
No, and any IVF clinic knows better than that. Most end up keeping embryos long after the owners stopped paying for storage and ceased to be findable, even though contractually they're allowed to discard or donate them, per the agreement originally signed by the owners. In recent years, there have been a couple of well-publicized cases of women giving birth from embryos that had been in storage for over a dozen years (one woman in Israel, using her own embryos; another in the US, using donor embryos from a couple who had extras left over and had delayed many years deciding whether to donate them or possibly use them). And there have been many babies born from embryos stored longer than 4 years.
If a baby is made from an embryo that has been stored for several years, will the Social Security Administration allow it to retire several years early?
I know: It's past my bedtime.
Maybe they rolled under the table.
They should be comforted by the possible brave sacrifice of their cells to the cause of stem cell research.
After all, it's not like they were "human beings" or anything- right? (sarc)
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