(13 Mar 2018) A woman whose embryos were affected by a tank malfunction at a Cleveland-area fertility clinic where they were being stored wants clinic officials and lawmakers to work together to avoid a similar situation in the future.
"Don't let this happen again," Marlo Emch (EMSH') said Tuesday during an interview with The Associated Press at her home in Burton, Ohio.
University Hospitals officials say as many as 2,000 frozen eggs and embryos may have been damaged at the facility in nearby Beachwood.
Emch didn't grow up with a brother or sister near her age. That's why she desperately wanted another child after giving birth last April to a son conceived through in vitro fertilization. She imagined Ryland having a partner to help navigate life and someone who would be there after she and her husband were gone.
"It's much more than some thing that was just being stored that got destroyed. Quite frankly, it's a lifetime of questions and just kind of thinking about what was lost in the long-term. That's really hard to put into words," Emch said.
She and her husband, Jeremy, married in their late 30s and struggled to have a child, losing one pregnancy after three months, before turning to a fertility clinic. Everything worked perfectly with the birth of their son, and they planned to try for one more this spring until being told last week that their seven remaining embryos may no longer be viable.
The couple, both now 42, won't know until the embryos are thawed and tested, but Marlo Emch says she's bracing for the worst.
"It is a death. I feel like it is like mourning a death, because, to me, within what my husband and I had being stored in that facility could have been potentially my child's sibling," she said.
Since receiving the devastating news, Emch started a Facebook support group open to the 700 affected patients from the University Hospitals clinic.
"I just thought: 'Why not harness the power of social media to try to bring us together to grieve and tell stories and have some sort of sense of community,'" she said.
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