Australian company Monash IVF, a specialist in in vitro fertilization (IVF), has been sued by 700 former patients who were part of a genetic screening program for destroying their embryos.
According to the lawsuit, Monash IVF, as well as the companies Repromed and Compass Fertility, performed genetic tests on the plaintiffs’ embryos, claiming that around 35% were abnormal, according to law firm Margalit Injury Lawyers, when in fact they had no problems and could have resulted in viable pregnancies.
The plaintiffs also accuse the company of deliberately manipulating clinical trials and forging patient signatures on consent forms, as well as destroying incriminating evidence of illegal experiments with patient embryos.
Following the lawsuit, which has had a significant impact on the medical and legal community, a settlement of AU$ 56 million has been reached, although it is still subject to final court approval.
A multimillion dollar industry
“Tragically, many patients had their embryos wrongly classified as abnormal and unsuitable for transfer as a result of these flawed […] IVF tests and lost the opportunity to have children,” said Michel Margalit, senior director of the law firm that is handling the case.
Danielle Bopping, who led the class action lawsuit, explained that she hopes to achieve “justice for the women and families whose lives have been irrevocably changed by the company’s business practices”.
She also hopes to expose the fact that IVF in Australia has become “a multi-million dollar industry that does not always put the interests of its patients first”, as well as the lack of regulation in the technical work within laboratories in these places.
According to data from market analysis consultancy IBIS World, it is estimated that Australia’s IVF industry, dominated by Virtus Health, Monash IVF and Genea, will generate around 515 million Australian dollars (462 million Euros) in 2024.
Bioethical assessment
The eugenic selection and discarding of embryos resulting from preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) techniques is a practice as widespread as it is bioethically reprehensible. No human being, even in an embryonic state, should be eliminated for having a disability. The generalization of these eugenic practices constitutes a serious attack on the dignity of these individuals in the embryonic state, as clinics seek to justify their use to improve the outcomes of assisted reproduction techniques, selecting only those embryos most likely to achieve a pregnancy.
Furthermore, the problem is exacerbated (if that is possible), when, as a result of this selection, viable embryos are destroyed either due to errors in the diagnosis, as in the case at hand, or due to the possibility of detecting small genetic errors that would not translate into any future disease, but which are identifiable thanks to improvements in the sensitivity of PGD techniques.
The industry’s interest in relation to assisted reproduction techniques implies the need to improve the efficacy of its procedures, for which it tends to discard those embryos that may reduce their success rates in terms of the birth of healthy babies. Economic interests thus fuel this trend.
However, turning the child into an object of desire that must satisfy the demands of those who pay for the entire process leads to many couples to willingly agree to produce a surplus of embryos that allows selection of the best and discarding of the rest, in order to obtain a “quality product” with a high economic cost. Embryos that do not pass the selection process are directly destroyed or cryopreserved, contributing to the tragedy of freezers full of human embryos with an uncertain fate, in an undignified situation.
The use of prenatal and preimplantation diagnostic techniques should be encouraged whenever they help to improve the health of fetuses or embryos, or to anticipate therapeutic measures during pregnancy or after birth. However, their use in order to select the healthy embryos and eliminate the “diseased” ones constitutes a clinical and anthropological setback, harkening back to dark chapters in history.
Julio Tudela and Cristina Castillo
Bioethics Observatory – Institute of Life Sciences
Catholic University of Valencia
