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    Three couples whose frozen embryos were destroyed when a wandering Mobile hospital patient dropped the specimens can sue for wrongful death because the embryos were “children,” the Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday in reversing a judge’s decision to throw out the case.

    The Center for Reproductive Medicine, a fertility clinic used by the couples, 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.

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

    That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

    The couples accused the defendants of wrongful death, negligence and breach of contract in two lawsuits filed in 2021 in Mobile County Circuit Court.

    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,” one of the filings stated.


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