How Often Are There ART Mistakes?

One quick note to add to the whole wrong embryo discussion, one that also ties back to an earlier and more general post about ART mistakes.  This story reports that a single clinic in the New Orleans area mislabeled dozens of frozen embryos creating the potential for many mix-ups like that experienced by Carolyn and Sean Savage.   

Even in the best of all possible worlds, mistakes are bound to happen.  And in our particular world, we really don’t know how frequently they occur.   That’s one of the reasons why all the legal uncertainty I’ve detailed is so important.  While the Savages and the Morells appear to have agreed on an outcome in their case, that won’t always be the case.   Litigation is bound to occur.  This new story convices me that it may well be sooner rather than later.

The Wrong Embryo and the Patchwork Quilt

As more details are reported about the recent wrong embryo case I can see even more issues to discuss.  (I’ve done several recent posts about it and there’s been some interesting discussion there.)  

To recap quickly, Carolyn Savage and her husband Sean had donated their own genetic material to create some embryos in order to use IVF.  After the birth of one child, the remaining embryos were frozen.    Last winter they went back to the clinic to use some of those frozen embryos in the hopes of having another child.    

Carolyn Savage did get pregnant but it turned out that the clinic had mistakenly used embryos of another couple, Paul and Shannon Morell.   Now as it happens, this time it seems it will work out as well as it possibly could–the couples are in contact and the Savages have agreed to turn the baby over to the Morells once it is born.   The key thing, to me, is that the couples have come to an agreement. 

But here’s a thing that leapt out at me in today’s news. 

The Wrong Embryo: Variations on a Theme

I want to continue the wrong-embryo thread a bit longer, but before I do I want to make it clear that I am now fully in the realm of the hypothetical.   The discussion here takes off from the earlier posts, but I’m now changing facts freely just to make myself good questions. 

In the real world, the Carolyn Savage ended up pregnant after an embryo that belonged to someone else was transferred into her uterus.   Now we’ve assumed that the embryo was actually created with the other couples sperm and egg.  But suppose that is not the case.   Suppose the other couple had purchased one of the elements (let’s start with sperm) and then used it to create the embryos that were frozen. 

The Wrong Embryo, II: An Afterthought

This picks up from yesterday’s post–read that first.  

Consider the position of the hospital when Carolyn Savage gives birth.   The hospital is obliged to prepare a certificate of live birth.   Suppose there is a blank for “mother” on the birth certificate.  What name should go in that blank?    

I am fairly sure that the ordinary practice is to fill in the name of the woman who just gave birth.   If  the Savages want to put some other name on the certificate (like the name of the woman whose egg was used and who will parent the child), should the hospital let them do that?   Should it require them to produce some sort of document instructing it (the hospital) to do so or should it just take any name they offered?   

The Wrong Embryo, II

I just sat down to write this entry, inspired by this morning’s Today Show and lo, I found I had already used my title.  Six months ago I wrote about another wrong embryo case, but I guess I’d forgotten.   Just goes to show that, as I said in that earlier post, accidents will happen.  

Anyway, here is the story from this AM:  Carolyn and Sean Savage had used IVF to conceive their third child.  They had left-over embryos which were frozen.   They decided they wanted to try to have a fourth child and so went to have the embryos thawed and transferred. 

A pregnancy resulted.   But it turned out the clinic had used the wrong embryos–embryos that had been prepared and stored for some other couple.   Somehow this came to light quite quickly (though obviously not quickly enough) and so the news of the error arrived along with the news that Carolyn was pregnant.   

Is Embryo Adoption Adoption?

(I’m both away for the Labor Day weekend and under the weather, so this will be short.) 

Last year I followed the progress of legislation in Georgia around some aspects of assisted reproduction.   (This is the end of the line, but the link there can take you to earlier posts.)  What began, at least ostensibly, as a legislative response to the birth of octuplets to Nadya Suleman ended with a law the promotes what is called “embryo adoption.”  

The idea here is that there are said to be many embryos left over from IVF attempts that are essentially in storage.  

Mistakes in ART–What’s the Remedy?

I’ve written on at least two earlier occasions about the consequences of mistakes in ART.   (If you want to go back, the posts are here and here.)  I’m suspect I have also let some of the “mistake” stories go by, too.   But there’ are stories of two incidents  circulating in the British press, and I thought I’d revisit the topic.    

I’ll start where I started before–mistakes are bound to happen in all human endeavors and ART is no exception.  But of course, as ART is more widely used, there will be more mistakes.   (Not necessarily a higher percentage of mistakes, but a constant percentage means a rising number of mistakes as the number of instances of ART rises.)  

Freezing Eggs to Extend Fertility

There’s an essay in this week’s Newsweek that I find vaguely troubling.    It’s by a young woman, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt, and it’s called “Why I Froze My Eggs.”   It’s exactly what the title suggests.

Freezing eggs, as opposed to freezing sperm or embryos, has only become truly practical recently.   It is, however, expensive–Lehmann-Haupt says upwards of $15,000–and that does not include the monthly freezer storage charges.    In addition, the process of harvesting the eggs to be frozen, which Lehmann-Haupt describes, is intrusive and stressful:  In order to harvest a reasonable number of eggs, you need to stimulate super-ovulation, which involves injection of specific drugs for a period of time.  (This is a fairly routine procedure in infertility treatment.  It’s also, I think, what an egg donor who is selling her eggs experiences.   I wonder if the 15K cost is typical of those procedures?)

The obvious question is why go through all this, if it isn’t to make money as an egg donor?   One circumstance under which it’s easy to imagine electing to do this is if a young woman were undergoing medical treatment–say chemotherapy–that might compromise her ability to produce eggs in the future.   She might well elect to have some of her eggs frozen for her future use.  

Georgia Update–Embryo Adoption Legislation Enacted

For some time now I’ve been following legislation in Georgia.   You can read through the older posts by following that link.   This all seemed to begin with the octuplets born in California.   (I’ve written quite a bit about that circus.  You could use the tag “octuplets” or start here and poke around a bit.)   The uproar around the octuplets (who you may recall were conceived via ART) lead to calls for regulation of ART.   At the time I wrote that this rush to regulation worried me and might go off in all sorts of unexpected (and to my mind undesirable) directions.

The Georgia legislation is actually a pretty good example of how the legislative process, once set in motion by public concern over one particular topic, can develop a life of its own.  Or perhaps more accurately, can serve as a vehicle for other interests.

I won’t retrace the whole history here–it’s there in the past posts on Georgia’s legislation.   But this is the end of the story, at least for this year.   The Georgia legislature has enacted a bill--HB388--that ostensibly provides for the adoption of embryos.  (It’s called the Option for Adoption Act.)    If you do not want to read the actual bill, you can read news coverage here.

Once more, news from Georgia

I’ve been following some legislation in Georgia recently.  It’s gone through a number of revisions.   You can read about them in the earlier posts. Interestingly, you can trace the origins of this legislation back to the furor over the octuplets.  The unease about the octuplets seems to have provided a vehicle for groups more generally concerned about ART.

The new version of the bill, one passed by the Georgia state senate, is described here.    Provision limiting sale of sperm and eggs are gone, as are restrictions on the number of embryos that can be implanted transferred and who can utilized ART.   The bill now provides that embryos can only be created for the treatment of human infertility.  The question of what qualifies as “infertility”–an important question when you consider people who wish to parent singly as well as same-sex couples, is left rather fuzzy.

Apparently there is also a separate bill, passed out of the Georgia House of Representatives, that promotes embryo adoption.  This is the first I’ve heard of this second bill, but you can find some discussion of embryo adoption here.