In May this year, Kate Plants organised a memorial service. She was grieving the loss of her five embryos.
Around 4000 embryos and eggs were destroyed when the temperature rose in a storage tank at a fertility centre in Cleveland, Ohio, over a weekend in March.
Plants had her embryos frozen four years ago, before having her ovaries removed as part of treatment for cancer. When the embryos were destroyed, she lost her chance of having biological children.
She and her husband had already decorated a nursery and talked about names. They decided they liked Autumn for a girl.
“I think about who they could have been and what they would have been like,” she told CNN earlier this year. “Those were our future children.”
Carrianne Mahoney, who suffered from polycystic ovarian syndrome, was another woman who lost her embryos in the malfunction.
"Now I’m never going to know what those babies were going to grow up to be or anything," she told CNN.
Feeling that her embryos weren’t being "honoured", Plants spoke to the director of the local Woodvale cemetery. He agreed to have a bench built in memory of the embryos and eggs, and that’s where Plants held the memorial service.
About 50 people attended.
"These children existed, even if they were the smallest form of children," Plants explained in The Guardian at the time.
"We’re telling the world that our embryos and eggs mattered."
But not everyone was sympathetic. In an article in the Washington Post earlier this week, Plants revealed that the idea of the memorial service had been attacked online.
Some people had called it "stupid". One woman, who had lost her son to cancer, messaged Plants to accuse her of "disrespecting" bereaved parents who had "birthed, held, nurtured, cared for and buried" their children.
The article in the Post drew a mostly unsympathetic reaction itself. Online, many people criticised Plants and the other would-be parents, declaring that the embryos were "just a cluster of cells" and "not even viable".
"Let’s not call tissue a baby," wrote one. "Don’t be weird."
Another woman labelled anyone filing a lawsuit as a "gold digger". "Go adopt and stop whining about something that was out of everyone’s control," she added.
It’s hard to believe that people could show such a lack of sympathy. To lose the chance of ever having biological children must be devastating, especially when it follows on from a health crisis like cancer.
Those eggs and embryos held people’s dreams of parenthood. They mattered. They deserve to be mourned, any way that the would-be parents want to mourn them.
More and more eggs and embryos are being frozen and kept in storage.
Lawsuits won’t bring back the ones that have been lost in Ohio, but they might make other fertility centres take extra care to make sure a similar malfunction won’t happen with their storage tanks.
Let people grieve and let them sue.
Top Comments
Everyone mourns differently. These people absolutely have the right to feel sad about the loss of their would-be children. I can't believe how people can be as insensitive as those commenters.
I think that these people can mourn however they like and the people attacking them are pretty disgusting, in my opinion. Although these obviously aren't babies, they represented something to this couple, they had hopes and dreams pinned on them and shouldn't be criticised for wanting to mourn that. They also deserve compensation for their loss. They would have been paying for these to be stored and had every right to expect that they would get to use them at some point in the future.
I mean, really, what do you get out of attacking these people during such a difficult time?
Ah...compo. That would be an interesting one. Would be interested to see how they sue - breach of contract, pain and suffering but not sure they could put a "price" on the embryoes and eggs.