Australia’s largest IVF provider is under investigation after wrongly implanting embryos – again. The fertility industry routinely destroys life while profiting from grief.
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(LifeSiteNews) — Last month, we reported on the story of biological parents of a child born to the wrong parents after an “IVF mix-up” in Queensland, Australia, discovering that they had no legal right to their child. Monash IVF, a fertility company, had accidentally “transferred” the wrong embryo; the couple discovered, after the baby was born, that they had “given birth to a stranger’s child.”
“On behalf of Monash IVF, I want to say how truly sorry I am for what has happened,” Monash Chief Executive Michael Knaap stated at the time. “All of us at Monash IVF are devastated and we apologise to everyone involved. We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time. Since becoming aware of this incident, we have undertaken additional audits and we’re confident that this is an isolated incident.”
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Knaap’s confidence, as it turns out, was misplaced. He was forced to resign when the company’s Clayton clinic in southeast Melbourne admitted that they had once again transferred the wrong embryo into a patient. As Sky News noted, this is “the second incident for the company in months.” This time, the bungle involved a lesbian couple. The fertility clinic “admitted to wrongly giving a patient her biological embryo, instead of her partner’s as planned.”
“Monash IVF has extended its sincere apologies to the affected couple, and we continue to support them," the company stated on June 10. Consequently, Michael Knaap resigned, although the company praised him in its statement, noting: “Since his appointment in 2019, Michael has led the organisation through a period of significant growth and transformation, and we thank him for his years of dedicated service.” Knaap has been CEO since 2019; Chief Financial Officer and Company Secretary Malike Jainudeen will be his replacement.
Despite Knaap’s departure, Monash IVF is now under fire from all sides. The company’s share price plunged by more than 27 percent to 54.4 cents shortly after the news broke, constituting its lowest point since January 2020 and a loss of $70 million of shares on June 10 alone.
According to Victoria’s Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas, Monash IVF is now under government investigation.
“Families should have confidence that the treatment they are receiving is done to the highest standard,” she said in a statement, telling reporters: “This will be quite devastating for the couple at the heart of this. We all know that the IVF journey can be a very long, torturous one. It can be very expensive as well.” The company, predictably, is promising rigid new safeguards and its own internal investigation (again).
A small silver lining is that the two high-profile, consecutive screwups are casting the entire fertility industry into much-deserved disrepute. “In reproductive care, trust is everything,” the University of South Australia bioethicist Dr. Hilary Bowman-Smart told the Guardian. “This mix-up – the second reported incident at Monash IVF – risks shaking confidence not just in one provider, but across the entire fertility sector.”
READ: The fertility industry’s commodification of children must end now
It is worth mentioning that the grotesque embryo mix-ups are not Monash IVF’s first major scandal. As Sky News reported:
The string of incidents follow the company's botched genetic testing program in 2019, which saw it pay $56 million in compensation to settle a class action involving 700 families. The program was abandoned in 2020 when it was discovered that faulty test results may have seen sound embryos discarded.
In short, Monash IVF was attempting to create made-to-order human beings in petri dishes but was throwing away – and thus killing – healthy as well as unhealthy embryos. The ethical nightmares created by Monash IVF are a microcosm of the fundamental flaws found in the entire industry, which were detailed at length in a recent interview on the John-Henry Westen Show by the former director of an IVF lab.
Pro-lifers have long pointed out that the IVF industry, which functions by destroying untold thousands of embryonic human lives, should not merely be regulated, but banned.
