Some 75 sperm samples also must be claimed. Patient coordinator Kathy Fink cannot say how many of those patients cannot yet be located, but she hopes the ad will help locate all of them or lighten any potential legal liability for the clinic. When the clinic first began freezing embryos in the mid-1980s, patients never even considered this dilemma. Several years ago, Tamis' clinic and others across the country began asking patients to sign contracts spelling out the ultimate fate of any unclaimed embryos. The clinic is in an all-out search, even for those who authorized the clinic to destroy their embryos under just such circumstances as these.
Some guidance does exist.
In 1997, an ethics panel of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine concluded that clinics could destroy embryos unclaimed after five years. But there's no legal precedent for Tamis' clinic. It has to be resolved. The embryos are created by fertilizing an egg with sperm in a laboratory and letting the fertilized egg grow for two days to about eight cells before being frozen and stored. When a woman wants to try to get pregnant, up to four embryos are thawed and inserted in her uterus.