Nine couples are suing an Orange County IVF clinic after they claim the clinic killed their embryos and tried to cover up the mistake.
According to the couples’ lawyers at Marcereau Law Group and Ikuta Hemesath LLP, Ovation Fertility made mistakes at its Newport Beach laboratory, then “knowingly implanted dead embryos into would-be mothers and then tried to conceal the laboratory mistakes that had poisoned the embryos,” their lawyers said in a news release.
Specifically, the laboratory used “lethal hydrogen peroxide instead of distilled water during pre-implantation dethawing procedures in January 2024,” then “attempted a cover-up that sought to trick patients into signing waivers of legal claims and non-disparagement agreements,” the plaintiffs claim.
“Ovation Fertility only disclosed the incidents after the couples’ fertility doctors questioned why there was a 100 percent failure rate for the embryos that had been thawed over the two-week pre-implantation period, when the success rate was normally above 75 percent,” the release explained.
In the meantime, couples “blamed themselves and their bodies, some going so far as to endure risky and painful medical procedures, such as hysteroscopies and biopsies, to determine what went wrong,” the attorneys said.
Fullerton residents Brooke Berger and Bennett Hardy are among the plaintiffs after the error “destroyed our last two embryos,” Berger said.
“It was devastating physically and emotionally to learn that after I had endured all the injections, medications, and painful and invasive procedures, it ultimately was for nothing,” she said. “We want to ensure that Ovation is held accountable for these entirely preventable errors and that this doesn’t happen again to other couples who are trying to grow their families.”
In response, Ovation issued a statement Tuesday afternoon.
“Ovation Fertility has protocols in place to protect the health and integrity of every embryo under our care,” the statement said. “This was an isolated incident related to an unintended laboratory technician error that impacted a very small number of patients. As soon as we recognized that pregnancy numbers were lower than our usually high success rates, we immediately initiated an investigation. We did not knowingly transfer nonviable embryos for implantation. We have been in close contact with these few impacted patients since the issue was discovered. We are grateful for the opportunity to help patients build a family and will continue to implement and enforce rigorous protocols to safeguard that process.”