Sarah Norcross, Director of the Progress Educational Trust (PET), said:
It will be distressing for women with frozen eggs to learn that, due to problems outside their control, their eggs may not survive the thawing process.
When a woman freezes her eggs, time is of the essence. In all cases, the quality of eggs declines upon reaching a certain age. Additionally, in cases where women are freezing eggs for medical reasons – for example, imminent cancer treatment – they will not want their treatment to be delayed.
If women affected by this incident have undergone medical treatment which has compromised their fertility, then their opportunity to have a biologically related child may have been lost. If women affected by this incident had sought to extend their reproductive choices by freezing their eggs, then they too may have lost their best opportunity to have a family, if the quality of their eggs has declined during the period that has elapsed.
We still do not know all the details of why this incident occurred. Hopefully, further details will be forthcoming. What does seem clear is that there was an appalling delay of around a year between this problem being known about, and affected patients being notified. Apparently, there are also some patients with frozen embryos who are similarly affected.
We need to understand more about what precisely has gone wrong, whether patients at other clinics are affected, and what the relevant regulators – including the HFEA and the MHRA – are doing about it. We also need reassurance, from regulators and clinics alike, that processes are in place to notify patients in a timely way when things go wrong.
