Margarita Komarova and her husband, Colin McDarmont, were thrilled to learn their fourth round of in vitro fertilization had produced six promising embryos.
Komarova, 37, who works in tech, told Business Insider that "everything was tracking positive" following the procedure in November 2023.
But seven days after the fertilization, their doctor called to say none of the embryos had gone on to develop and be suitable for transfer.
"We were devastated," Komarova said, adding that the embryos were discarded almost immediately. "We thought we'd done everything right before the retrieval."
The couple had eaten healthily and reduced stress by doing acupuncture and yoga as part of the process. The period in which she'd had to inject herself with fertility medication had been particularly taxing, Komarova added.
"You find yourself searching for answers," she said of their despair. "We started to blame ourselves — and each other —because we didn't know what had gone wrong."
The pair received an email from their fertility clinic three weeks later. It alerted them to an issue concerning the IVF "culture media," the liquid used in the technique to grow embryos. It said the outcome of their particular cycle "may have negatively impacted."
"It was confusing," McDarmont said. "We had a lot of questions."
In January 2024, they learned of a recall notice issued to IVF clinics across the US by CooperSurgical, the giant pharmaceutical company that manufactured the solution used in their procedure. It was later established that three lots of the liquid had been missing the important ingredient of magnesium. The essential nutrient is key to the development of embryos in the lab, typically in a petri dish.
Komarova and McDarmont have filed a lawsuit
A year on, Komarova and McDarmont are suing Cooper saying they may have lost their chance of having children. The suit says the firm failed to implement proper testing and quality control during manufacture.
The pair, from Los Angeles, hired attorneys from the Clarkson Law Firm — which represents several of the hundreds of IVF patients believed to have been impacted — and filed a complaint of gross negligence.
"We're hoping this will force them to provide actual information and details in terms of how this happened, and more importantly, the safeguards to prevent it from ever happening again," McDarmont, a 52-year-old product manager, told BI.
The lawsuit says Cooper's "reckless disregard" had severely impacted the couple's ability to have a biological baby, leaving them "distraught they may never be able to start the family they imagined."
It says that Komarova has had depression and that McDarmont "continues to experience severe emotional distress as a result of the incident."
The would-be mom said her body had taken nearly a year to recover
The filing says Cooper "failed to adequately monitor their manufacturing system" when "it knew, or should have known, the inclusion of magnesium in the culture media is critical to embryo development."
CooperSurgical didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Komarova, an only child who'd always wanted a big family, told BI she and her husband had spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to get pregnant since they got married in 2020.
She said that every month that passed without them conceiving felt like a lost opportunity, made more pertinent because of their age.
It had taken almost a year for her body to recover from the ordeal of the impacted procedure before she underwent IVF for the "fifth and final time" last October, she said.
"It was hard to rebound from the failed cycle and prepare for the next," Komarova said. "It's not something where you can just jump in and do another one."
The lawsuit said she'd struggled with abdominal pain for weeks, weight gain from the hormonal injections, and fluctuating moods after the attempt.
It said she'd undergone "significant physical strain due to the original wasted cycle, as well as the new cycle necessitated" made by Cooper's "faulty product."
At the same time, it added, the couple continued to experience "deep sadness, guilt, hopelessness, shame, disappointment and anger."
McDarmont said the recall notice read as if it was a product recall of cereal boxes
Komarova described how she and McDarmont meticulously prepared for the 2023 retrieval.
"You do everything you're supposed to do, like eat organic food and reduce the amount of stress you're under," she told BI. "Then you do the procedure, the results come in, and it's a punch to the gut."
McDarmont said that he was infuriated by the outcome and that it could have been avoided if Cooper had followed the correct protocol. "The despair, disappointment, and anger haven't gone away," he said.
He said the recall notice sounded cold and perfunctory, "like it was a recall of something like cereal boxes or furniture items."
The couple filed the lawsuit in Bridgeport, Connecticut — the city where CooperSurgical is headquartered — and asked for a jury trial.
Komarova and McDarmont were relieved to discover that their fifth cycle of IVF has been successful — at least so far. It resulted in several embryos that remain frozen.
Still, Komarova said she found the thought of the "next chapter" — which will involve the transfer of an embryo into her body — "scary."
Correction: January 10, 2025, a previous version of this story misstated the amount the couple was suing for.
