Suits fi led over losses by fertility clinics

CLEVELAND — Two fertility clinics across the country from each other experienced equipment failures on the same day that may have damaged hundreds of frozen eggs and embryos, a stunning coincidence that already is producing lawsuits from crestfallen couples.

Lawyers for Amber and Elliott Ash, of the suburb of Bay Village, and an unidentified Pennsylvania couple have sued University Hospitals after its fertility clinic in suburban Cleveland discovered a storage tank malfunction March 4, possibly damaging as many as 2,000 frozen eggs and embryos.

The lawsuits come as a San Francisco fertility clinic said thousands of frozen eggs and embryos may have been damaged in a liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank on the same day.

Lawyers for the couples who went to the Ohio clinic are seeking class-action status from a judge. The Ashes said they stored two embryos at the fertility clinic after Elliott’s cancer diagnosis in 2003. They said they were told their embryos are no longer viable.

“It’s heartbreaking, just heartbreaking,” Mrs. Ash told WEWS-TV. “The medical community calls it tissue. I like to think of it as my children.”

The Pennsylvania couple was beginning to set up a time last week for transferring a frozen embryo to the woman’s womb when they were told something went wrong, attorneys said. They had spent eight years trying to become parents, attorney Lydia Floyd said.

University Hospitals officials said that they are determined to help the patients and will conduct an independent review.

Dr. Carl Herbert, president of the Pacific Fertility Clinic in San Francisco, said a senior embryologist noticed the nitrogen level in one tank was very low during a routine check March 4. That embryologist, Herbert said, “immediately rectified” the problem by refilling the tank. The embryos, he said, were later transferred to a new tank.

The clinic is sending letters to about 500 patients “that may have been involved in this tank,” Herbert said.