Being Pregnant
Couple Sues Fertility Clinic After Baby Was Born With A Disability
Would you sue if your child was born with a disability that stems from the egg donor's DNA?
Some couples spend years trying to have a baby without success. Often, when they’ve exhausted all other options, they turn to fertility clinics for help.
But fertility clinics can be extremely expensive. In fact, a quick glance around the internet shows the average cost of IVF is $12,00 but can be as much as $15,000. So you want your money’s worth, right? But does that involve a baby with a clean bill of health or are some issues and disabilities too difficult to screen? That’s the question a New York City judge is going to be forced to answer.
As Kathianne Boniello reports for the NY Post, an Upper East Side couple is suing a fertility clinic because their baby was born with developmental disabilities.
Marie and James Dennehy claim their child was born with a devastating genetic disorder after a Madison Avenue facility failed to properly screen their egg donor. The Dennehys are suing suing Dr. Alan Copperman at Reproductive Medicine Associates for $500,000. As Boniello reports, neither side is commenting about the case.
This isn’t the first time a couple has sued a fertility clinic. In fact, it happens all the time. In 2007 a couple famously sued a Park Avenue fertility clinic . Thomas and Nancy Andrews claimed the clinic used another man’s sperm to inseminate Nancy Andrews’ eggs. A black baby was subsequently born to the Hispanic mother and white father. Three DNA tests confirmed that Thomas Andrews was not the baby’s biological father.
There have been other embryo mix-ups and couples have also sued clinics for mistakenly destroying embryos they wanted saved. But this lawsuit is, to my knowledge, the first one filed because of a birth defect or disability.
What are your thoughts? Of course clinics should be held responsible for mix-ups, but what about a disability? Should a clinic be held responsible for any genetic disorders in egg and sperm donors? Would you sue?
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6 Comments
Nadia commented on Oct 17 11 at 3:12 pmI can’t help but think how ridiculous that is. I mean, I know that fertility treatments are expensive. But there are NO guarantees that a child will be born without a birth defect, whether a child is conceived naturally or through IVF. Didn’t they understand that when they signed up? I completely agree with the couple who sued because of an embryo mix-up. That is 100% understandable, because it was the clinic’s fault. But suing because a child has a birth defect? That seems greedy and cold to me. I feel bad for the child.
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Diera commented on Oct 17 11 at 3:53 pmIt depends on whether or not the clinic did not live up to their own publicized standards. Whenever you have a child you take the chance of having a child with a genetic disorder (I have a child with a genetic disorder that was a spontaneous mutation, so no amount of screening of anybody would have prevented it). There’s no way that a clinic could hope to prevent all such problems in children born from their procedures. However, if the clinic promised to screen for certain disorders, and didn’t, that would be grounds for a suit. I will say, though, that characterizing the parents as ‘greedy and cold’ and pitying their child on so little data seems completely unfair. Seriously ill children require a lot of care, which costs a lot of money (even if you have so-called good insurance). I obviously don’t know any of the details, but it’s quite possible you could replace ‘greedy and cold’ with ‘scared and desperate’, especially if this couple already blew their savings on the IVF. If their child really has a ‘devastating genetic disorder’, $500,000 is not going to go all that far.
jenny kiuop commented on Oct 18 11 at 9:09 amNo I would not sue…you don’t know wat God plans are. There are people trying to conceive like myself and how does the Dr know your baby is going to have a disability. I hope n pray the judge denies this just wana be greedy. Ughhh people.
Beth A. commented on Oct 18 11 at 4:15 pmIt seems to me this isn’t a story about IVF, and framing it that way is really confusing the issue. It’s a story about a couple that used donor eggs from a donor that carried a genetic disease that should have been screened for before she donated. This could just as easily have happened if they had done an IUI with donor sperm. Unless you use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to avoid specific conditions, nobody reasonable thinks IVF comes with a guarantee of a healthy baby without genetic problems. But if you use a clinic offering donor eggs or sperm because you can’t produce a healthy child of your own, it’s entirely reasonable to expect that they would screen the donor for genetic diseases that could be passed down.
Dr. Raul Olivares commented on Oct 19 11 at 5:32 amIf clinics had to test donors for all the genetic diseases gamete donation will be absolutely unaffordable. For example there are more than 6,000 known single-gene disorders, which occur in about 1 out of every 200 births.Should be tst the donor for all these disordesr??? It’s ridiculous… Couples must accept that donors can be unknown carriers of some diseases.
Monica Bielanko commented on Oct 19 11 at 1:35 pm@Dr. Raul Olivares – Excellent point.
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