Frozen embryos are ‘children,’ Alabama Supreme Court rules in couples’ wrongful death suits

AL.COM, ALABAMA – Three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed when a wandering hospital patient dropped the specimens can sue for wrongful death because the embryos were “children,” the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic, and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center, where the embryos were being stored, claimed the couples could not sue for wrongful death because Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act does not cover embryos outside the womb.

But the Alabama Supreme Court disagreed.

The Wrongful Death of a Minor Act “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell …

“The patient removed embryos from the freezer, and ‘it is believed that the cryopreservation’s subzero temperatures burned the eloping patient’s hands, causing him or her to drop the cryopreserved embryonic human beings on the floor, where they began to slowly die.'”

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