- Clarkson Law Firm filed suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against California Fertility Partners, Pinnacle Fertility, TMRW Life Sciences, and Reprotech LLC.
- The complaint alleges the clinic moved a patient’s 28 cryopreserved eggs across state lines to an automated storage facility without her consent.
- The plaintiff seeks injunctive relief and a full accounting of the eggs’ location, custody, and condition.
LOS ANGELES, CA – Clarkson Law Firm, the prominent California-based public interest firm, filed a lawsuit today in Los Angeles County Superior Court against California Fertility Partners (CFP), a prominent Los Angeles fertility clinic, its parent company Pinnacle Fertility, Inc., TMRW Life Sciences and Reprotech LLC.
The lawsuit, filed by a plaintiff identified in court filings as Jane Doe to protect her privacy, alleges that Pinnacle-CFP unilaterally transported her frozen eggs without her consent, shipped them across state lines, and handed them to an automated, AI-operated storage warehouse, exposing the eggs to irreversible harm and endangering her decades-long dream of motherhood.
For as long as she has remembered, Jane Doe had always wanted to be a mother, and in late 2015, she undertook one of the most physically, emotionally, and financially demanding investments of her life to preserve her future ability to have children: egg retrieval and long-term cryopreservation, known colloquially as “egg banking.” After spending more than two years researching fertility clinics, she decided to place her trust with California Fertility Partners (CFP), who cryopreserved and stored 28 of her retrieved eggs.
However, recently, during a routine call to pay her storage bill, she was alarmed to learn that her eggs had been moved, without her consent, across state lines to TMRW Life Sciences, an AI-powered, high-volume robot automated facility she had never heard of, never selected to safeguard her precious future, and with which she had no relationship of any kind. When she demanded an explanation, she was told her eggs could have stayed where she had chosen to keep them if she had simply “paid more.”
“Our plaintiff trusted California Fertility Partners with the future of her family, and in return, this profit-hungry company treated her only chance at motherhood as just another piece of inventory, moving it wherever was most convenient for them,” said Tracey Cowan, partner at Clarkson Law Firm and lead for the firm’s Fertility Negligence practice area. “Even if she wanted to, she can’t simply start over with another round of retrieval. Her fertile window has closed, and these 28 eggs are all she has. To make matters worse, she likely will not learn whether these eggs survived until she tries to start her family. California Fertility Partners has left her waiting to find out if her dream of motherhood is still alive. No one should have to live with that kind of uncertainty.”
Research shows that every movement, transport, or change in storage conditions introduces great destructive risk to frozen eggs, as they must remain continuously preserved at precise cryogenic temperatures to maintain viability. Even minor temperature changes can render them nonviable and damage to the eggs from improper transport can’t be detected through ordinary testing. It could show up as failed fertilization, failed implantation, a high-risk pregnancy that endangers her life or her child’s life, miscarriage, or birth defects – there’s no way of knowing.
“Our plaintiff did everything right. She researched for years, chose her clinic carefully, and secured a written promise that her eggs would stay safe in California Fertility Partners’ Los Angeles facility,” said Ryan Clarkson, founder and managing partner at Clarkson Law Firm. “California Fertility Partners broke that promise and gambled with the only chance she has to become a mother, prioritizing their bottom line and business efficiencies over her chances at building a family and having biological children in the future. She paid for on-site, physician-managed care. Now her life’s most precious investment is sitting hundreds of miles away in an AI-run storage facility. It’s a wild abuse of trust to make this dangerous, AI-cost-cutting move, much less without client consent.”
Through the lawsuit, the plaintiff is seeking injunctive relief to ensure that her biological material is not tested, thawed, fertilized, manipulated, donated, sold, discarded, wasted, moved, or otherwise used without her prior, express, written authorization, and requiring CFP-Pinnacle to account fully for the present location, custody, and condition of her 28 cryopreserved eggs.
About Clarkson
Clarkson, a public interest law firm founded in 2014, is made up of experienced trial lawyers, paralegals, clerks, and litigation professionals. We believe the law is an integral part of society’s checks and balances, empowering everyday citizens to create change. Justice means more to us than just recovering monetary damages. Our clients are an essential part of establishing precedents and policies that help protect countless others.
