IVF scandal: California couples claim clinic knowingly implanted DEAD embryos into them and tried to cover up fatal mistakes

A leading IVF clinic knowingly implanted dead embryos into expectant mothers in an attempt to cover up their fatal mistakes, a lawsuit alleges.

Nine California couples claim clumsy lab workers at Ovation Fertility destroyed the embryos during storage with harmful cleaning agents.

The lawsuit says the embryos allegedly died “immediately” when they were stored, and that workers then knowingly “implanted these dead embryos into the expectant mothers.”

According to the lawsuit, the clinic did this despite the risks of complications such as ectopic pregnancy, in which the embryo implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus.

One couple, Brooke Berger, and Bennet Hardy, now 37 and 33, said they were “heartbroken” after discovering that Ovation Fertility may have destroyed their last two embryos, which was their last hope of starting a family.

“When we found out that there was no way this would have ended in a successful pregnancy, we were so disappointed and heartbroken,” Ms. Berger said.

“It was physically and emotionally devastating to hear that after going through all the injections, medications and painful and invasive procedures, it was ultimately for nothing,” she added.

‘It just feels very disrespectful. To get no admission of guilt on their part, to try to silence us.

‘It’s just so disrespectful not to be treated as a priority for that, to not have them convey any understanding of the harm they’ve caused – us and many other people. “I’m just shocked that they’re treating us so badly.” Mrs. Berger.

‘To see [my wife] I have to go through all this physically and mentally and for this to happen is really frustrating,” Mr Hardy said.

Ovation Fertility is a national storage treatment and IVF laboratory in Newport Beach that bills itself as one of the leading fertility laboratories in the US.

The company offers IVF, in which an egg is fertilized by sperm in a test tube and then the resulting embryo is inserted into a woman.

Ovation also offers “safe short- and long-term storage for frozen eggs, sperm and embryos,” the website says.

A single IVF cycle – including genetic testing – is estimated to cost $25,000.

But the new lawsuit alleges that Ovation “hired inexperienced, cheap, unqualified, and untrained workers to cut corners and maximize profits — at the expense of the health and safety of its patients and their embryos.”

The filing alleges that a laboratory embryologist improperly used hydrogen peroxide or a similar cleaning agent instead of a sterile solution such as distilled water in the incubator where the frozen embryos were stored.

All nine couples claim that Ovation used high-quality embryos that should have had a 75 percent or better chance of success between January 18 and January 30.

But the chance was zero percent because the clinic knowingly used nonviable embryos, the complaint said, and none of the women became pregnant.

Ms. Berger and Mr. Hardy moved to Orange County, Calfornia, last July and sent their remaining two frozen embryos to their new doctor, who used the Ovation laboratories. It would be their fifth round of IVF.

Ms. Berger had already undergone months of hormone injections, as well as invasive and risky medical procedures to retrieve eggs and prepare for implantation.

‘I still have nerve pain from those injections, which takes months to go away. My husband was rearranging his work so he could administer these medications to me,” she said.

“And then all the time we’re just trying to maintain the hope that whatever you do is worth it, that in the end you’ll get something out of it.”

The implant procedure at Ovation was “uncomfortable,” Ms. Berger said.

‘They insert a catheter into your uterus, which is a very uncomfortable procedure, and then you supposedly wait for them to check whether the embryos are viable.

‘There was a delay of several minutes as I lay there in this uncomfortable position trying to breathe through the pain – you don’t get pain treatment for that.

‘Then they transfer it very quickly, you can see where [the embryos] go for an ultrasound in the womb.

‘The doctor said everything went very well, that they were well placed and that he thought we had a good chance.’

“They were unaware that their embryos were already dead as a result of Ovation’s misconduct,” the lawsuit said.

The couple then had to wait twelve days, hoping to see a positive pregnancy test at the end that would never come.

“That week is actually very, very difficult,” Ms. Berger said. ‘You’re still on the meds, you’re still keeping track of everything.

‘Every twinge you feel in your body, you wonder: is that a sign that this is going well, if this lasts? Because it is in your own body, it is impossible to escape it. You think about it all the time.

“When you finally get that negative pregnancy test, it’s very difficult to deal with.”

Some of the other couples involved in the lawsuit even underwent risky and painful medical procedures, such as hysteroscopies and biopsies, to determine if something had gone wrong on their end.

A hysteroscopy involves a surgeon looking inside your uterus through a camera attached to a tube to diagnose and treat abnormalities, while a biopsy tests a sample of tissue from the uterine wall.

The couples only found out that something dodgy had happened after several of the couple’s fertility doctors questioned why there was a 100 percent failure rate for the embryos thawed during that two-week period, when the success rate is normally above 75 percent lay. .

Another couple, referred to only as TS and KS in the complaint, started their IVF process in 2023.

Only two of the twelve eggs recovered were deemed successfully fertilized and implantable.

‘We had hope, a lot of hope, because we had one female embryo of very high quality, plus one male embryo of low quality. We took our best chances and transferred our girl named Kalani Noelle on January 29, 2024. She was meant to complete our family,” the couple said.

But unfortunately they never became pregnant. “Our hearts are broken and we will forever mourn the loss of our girl embryo,” they said.

Now Ovation has bombarded Ms. Berger with phone calls to try to “sweep the matter under the rug, in an effort to trick patients into signing waivers of their claims and non-disparagement agreements,” according to the lawsuit.

“This whole process of them trying to contact us… it’s just so transactional. There has been no apology, no straight answer.

“We shouldn’t have to have this lawsuit to find out what happened to our embryos. It’s just not right,” Hardy said.

Mrs. Berger and Mr. Hardy remain desperate to become parents and plan to try another ovarian stimulation cycle.

‘If we want to move forward, we’re going to have to go through a whole different stimulation cycle, which involves even more drugs and monitoring and more procedures. It is much more intense and without any guarantee that we will get any more viable embryos from that process,” she said.

“I’m almost three years older than when we first recovered these embryos, and the chances don’t improve as you get older.”

Ms Berger said: ‘We want to ensure that Ovation is held accountable… and that this doesn’t happen again to other couples trying to grow their families.’

Mr Hardy said: ‘It is heartbreaking and frustrating to think of all the effort we have gone through, and the fact that my wife has sacrificed her body physically and mentally with this exhausting process.’

Attorney Robert Marcereau, of the Marcereau Law Group, said: ‘Ovation Fertility betrayed the trust of these people at their most vulnerable moments.’

Attorney Michelle Hemesath, of Ikuta Hemesath LLP, said: ‘Ovation Fertility touted his supposed expertise to the general public when his activities were steeped in incompetence, as the lawsuit alleges.”

Ovation Fertility has been mentioned other lawsuits in the past.