CV NEWS FEED // An article published in The Washington Post Monday morning appeared to acknowledge “errors” in the process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) which “are rarely made public.”
The analysis piece titled “Most IVF errors go unreported, experts say,” described IVF practices as “opaque.”
“When a storage tank at a San Francisco fertility center imploded, 4,000 human eggs and embryos were damaged or destroyed,” wrote the article’s author McKenzie Beard.
“A subsequent jury ruling attributed much of the disaster to a manufacturing flaw while also implicating the center itself,” Beard added.
She continued:
A subsequent jury ruling attributed much of the disaster to a manufacturing flaw while also implicating the center itself …
The lab director had unplugged a malfunctioning computer, muting 128 alarms that warned of trouble. Lab personnel didn’t transfer the tank’s contents to a backup vessel after the computer failed.
Beard noted that the news of the civil lawsuit filed after the tragic 2018 incident gave the public “a rare glimpse into the insular world of U.S. fertility care.”
“Experts say errors and accidents often go unreported in the burgeoning industry, which is largely self-policed,” the Post writer indicated.
Per Gibbs Law Group, a jury in 2021 “awarded $14.975 million in aggregate damages to five” families who lost human embryos and eggs as a result of tank failure.
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“Without data on errors, experts say it’s impossible to measure the quality of U.S. reproductive care,” Beard wrote later in her piece:
While states license clinics and professional bodies oversee practitioners, inspection and accreditation of labs primarily fall to private, voluntary organizations. Many inspectors are lab directors themselves who review one another’s work looking for systemic problems, not lost reproductive material
“[T]he federal government generally stays out of fertility clinics because of the fraught politics, for both Democrats and Republicans, of regulating the creation and destruction of embryos,” Beard stated at the end of her analysis.
The same day, left-wing outlet Vox published another article appearing to criticize the so-called “fertility industry.”
In the piece titled, “The failed promise of egg freezing,” author Anna North wrote: “[F]ar from ushering in a new era of gender equality, some experts say, the procedure serves as another way for companies to make money from stoking women’s anxieties.”
North continued: “Sales pitches about egg freezing, rather than liberating women from their biological clocks, simply became another way to put pressure on them, says Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington.”
The Vox article concluded that egg freezing “has done little … to materially change women’s lives.”
Later Monday morning, Heritage Foundation Senior Research Associate Emma Waters wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that she is “thrilled” that two left-of-center outlets simultaneously “published stories digging into the Wild West of the fertility industry.”
“Despite many bold promises to women, egg freezing fails many while negligence in IVF is rarely publicly or legally addressed,” added Waters, a prominent critic of so-called “reproductive technology.”
“Women deserve better!” she emphasized.
