IVF Patients Say a Test Caused Them to Discard Embryos. Now They're Suing

TIME recently released an article on PGT-A featuring myStoria community member Allison Freeman 📰

“PGT-A is a screening test performed after a patient’s eggs have been retrieved and fertilized to create embryos, but before any of those embryos have been transferred to her uterus. Clinicians take tiny biopsies from the embryos, removing just a few cells to check whether they have the right number of chromosomes. Embryos with cells that have either too many or too few chromosomes are less likely to result in full-term pregnancies, so PGT-A aims to identify them so clinicians can work with the strongest of the bunch.

But the more Petersen read, the more she doubted the test’s benefits. Numerous researchers, she learned, had questioned PGT-A’s accuracy, efficacy, and clinical usefulness. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, the value of the test “has not been demonstrated” for routine screening of all IVF patients.”

“Allison Freeman, whose Florida-based firm Constable Law is spearheading the class-action suits, is an IVF mother herself. She became “obsessed” with PGT-A after clinicians made her feel “crazy” for opting out when she was a patient, and only more so after two of her friends ended up with no usable embryos after going through PGT-A testing. Curious, Freeman dug into online...