The lawsuit that resulted in a highly publicized Alabama Supreme Court decision that frozen embryos in a lab count as “minor children” was dismissed Wednesday after plaintiffs settled their wrongful death claims against the in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinic and Mobile hospital where the embryos were accidentally dropped on the floor.
Mobile County Circuit Court Judge Jill Parrish Phillips issued an order dismissing with prejudice the claims of James and Emily LePage, William Tripp Fonde, and Caroline Fonde against the Center for Reproductive Medicine and the Mobile Infirmary Association. The order states that the plaintiffs cannot later choose to re-file their action.
Three couples initially sued the clinic and hospital for negligence and wrongful death, claiming that the clinic allowed a patient to wander into the embryology lab, pick up five fertilized embryos stored at subzero temperatures, and then drop those embryos, rendering them unusable for the IVF procedure. In their lawsuit, the couples identified as “parents” of the embryos and claimed that their “embryonic children” “began to slowly die” after being put on the floor by accident.
Scott Aysenne and Felicia Burdick-Aysenne, the third couple who filed the complaint, did not join in the move to dismiss it, and their claims remain pending. A separate but identical complaint filed by Raymond Lee and Sarah Brackett over the same incident is still ongoing, but the plaintiffs have requested that it be dismissed.
When the conservative Alabama Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to overturn a lower-court decision and proclaim that frozen embryos are children under state law, the case received global attention. As a result, the plaintiffs were able to pursue their legal hypothesis that dropping fertilized embryos resulted in wrongful death.
In his long decision in favor of the plaintiffs, Justice Jay Mitchell referred to the frozen embryos as “extrauterine children” and “unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed.” Mitchell decided that Alabama’s wrongful death law affected “all unborn children, regardless of their location.”
The verdict sparked an immediate and strong backlash. As predicted by the Alabama Supreme Court’s lone dissenting justice, hospitals in the state began to announce that they would no longer perform IVF operations due to the legal concerns posed by the decision.
Within weeks after the verdict, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) signed a Republican-proposed bill that would protect IVF treatments by insulating facilities and healthcare professionals from legal liabilities associated with IVF care. Critics contended that the proposal fails to address the question of whether the Alabama Supreme Court’s finding gives frozen embryos the same legal rights as other “children” under state law.