In one recent case, a woman underwent IVF, carried a pregnancy to term, and gave birth, only to discover that the fertility clinic had transferred another couple’s embryo. In another, patients alleged that defective laboratory technology and practices compromised embryos before they could be successfully transferred. In a third, cryopreserved eggs entrusted to a fertility clinic disappeared or degraded during storage and transportation.
These legal cases illustrate the unresolved questions surrounding IVF in the United States.
As assisted reproductive technology (ART) becomes increasingly common, courts are being asked to determine what exactly has been lost when IVF goes wrong. Is the injury the loss of biological parenthood? The destruction of an embryo? A lost chance at pregnancy? The violation of informed consent?
Cases like these are potentially more common as the rate of IVF use increases. In 2024, clinics belonging to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported 449,772 IVF treatment cycles and 100,158 babies born through IVF. That was the first year the figure surpassed 100,000. With 3.63 million total U.S. births that year, SART-reported IVF births alone represented roughly 2.8 percent of American births, or about one in 36.
As IVF becomes more common, the law surrounding it is being built in these court cases.
The courts and the IVF laboratory
A recent Reuters Legal analysis identified three types of IVF claims now appearing in federal courts: negligent storage or preservation of reproductive material, defective products used during IVF, and malpractice involving embryo selection or transfer.
Each category creates its own legal problems. Taken together, however, they expose a deeper difficulty: traditional legal categories were not designed for a medical process in which eggs, embryos, genetic information, prospective parenthood, and children can all become separated from one another.
In Ivison v. Extend Fertility, Lauren Ivison had three eggs cryopreserved at a New York fertility clinic. When the eggs were later transported and thawed, one storage device contained no egg and another contained only a degraded egg. In September 2025, a federal judge allowed negligence claims to proceed, concluding that even a small lost probability of pregnancy could constitute a legally recognizable injury.
The law needed a category for what had disappeared. The answer was not simply the monetary value of an egg. Instead, the court allowed the case to proceed around the idea of a lost reproductive opportunity.
That language is understandable. It recognizes that reproductive material cannot be valued like ordinary property. But it also reveals the difficulty facing the law: the significance of what was lost derives precisely from its relationship to the possibility of a particular human life.
What happens when embryos are harmed?
In Jane Doe v. CooperSurgical, two Los Angeles couples alleged that defective embryo-culture solutions damaged embryos created during IVF. The plaintiffs claimed the solution lacked a component necessary for proper embryo development. In March, a federal court in Connecticut permitted manufacturing-defect, failure-to-warn, negligence, and failure-to-recall claims to move forward.
Here, the object of the alleged injury is different. These were not unfertilized eggs representing a future possibility of conception. The litigation concerns embryos that already existed but allegedly could no longer be used to pursue pregnancy.
American law remains deeply unsettled over how embryos outside the womb should be classified. The Alabama Supreme Court brought that uncertainty into public view in 2024 when it permitted parents to bring wrongful-death claims after their frozen embryos were destroyed. Alabama lawmakers responded within weeks by granting broad civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to embryos arising from IVF services.
The result is an unusual tension. Parents can understandably experience the destruction of embryos as the loss of their children or their hoped-for children. Fertility clinics themselves handle embryos as extraordinarily consequential biological material. Yet the legal system often lacks a stable category for describing why their destruction constitutes an injury.
When the child is not the injury
In Murray v. Coastal Fertility Specialists, a clinic allegedly transferred another couple’s embryo into Krystena Murray. She carried the pregnancy and gave birth, eventually relinquishing custody after the child’s genetic parents were identified. When the clinic sought to characterize her lawsuit as an impermissible “wrongful birth” action, a federal judge rejected that argument. Murray was not claiming that the child’s life was itself an injury. Her claim centered on the clinic’s failure to transfer the correct embryo and the physical and emotional consequences that followed.
Another New York case raises an even sharper question. In Cheng v. Zhang Medical, the plaintiffs pursued IVF intending to have a female child and alleged that the clinic used a less accurate method of genetic testing without adequate disclosure. The resulting pregnancy was male. The court allowed portions of the malpractice and informed-consent case to proceed but rejected damages based simply on the birth of a healthy boy.
Modern reproductive technology increasingly promises not merely assistance in conceiving a child, but greater control over which child is conceived or born. Genetic testing, embryo selection, donor gametes, and other technologies can transform procreation from receiving a child into choosing among possible children according to specified characteristics.
This is already option, dystopian in nature but attractive to some couples, offered by organizations that do polygenic testing of embryos in an effort for “genetic optimization.” Not just the sex, but the propensity for certain diseases, intelligence, or physical abilities can be “determined” by such organizations, or so the claim goes.
The impulse is part of a larger push to determine worth based on ability or desired characteristics. For now, courts have not said a healthy child is an “injury” just because he or she is a boy (or girl).
The law needs more than a price for reproductive loss
None of these cases resolves the broader moral debate over IVF. But they do illustrate the ways legal categories have not caught up to the technology. And the current regulations cannot answer the questions litigation is uncovering.
What obligations does a clinic assume when it creates and stores human embryos? What does informed consent require when parents are choosing embryos on the basis of genetic information? How should damages be calculated when an embryo is destroyed? How should the law distinguish between compensating someone for medical negligence and placing a monetary value on the perceived undesirability of a particular child?
Those are questions about medicine, law, and more fundamentally human dignity.
The emerging IVF cases provide an opportunity for a more fundamental conversation. The question should not be only whether fertility clinics have followed proper procedures after something goes wrong. It should also be what our procedures assume about the human beings whose lives, parentage, and identities are being shaped by them.
IVF has advanced faster than the moral and legal vocabulary surrounding it.
The courts are now being asked to fill that gap. The answers they provide will help determine not simply who pays when IVF fails, but how American law understands embryos, parents, and children.