A Manhattan woman waited 15 years to become a mom with the eggs she froze at a fertility clinic — only to learn they’d been lost by the time she was ready to use them at the age of 57, according to a lawsuit.
Paula Cervoni was 42 and single in 2006, when she decided to preserve 11 of her eggs at Advanced Fertility Services on the Upper East Side, paying more than $21,000 for the procedure, she said in a Manhattan Supreme Court filing.
Cervoni then shelled out $600 each year for the next decade to store the eggs, until 2016, when the clinic changed hands and she signed an agreement with the new company to keep her oocytes, or immature eggs, safe, she said in legal papers.
By 2021, she “was ready to use her oocytes and either become pregnant using them and her partner’s sperm or to contract with a surrogate to carry their child,” Cervoni claimed in the litigation.
But no one at Manhattan Fertility Services, which took over Advanced Fertility Services’ storage business, could confirm whether Cervoni’s eggs were there, and instead pointed her in the direction of other companies they claimed were in charge of the genetic materials, she said in the legal filing.
“These companies have acknowledged no accountability or responsibility for the misrepresentations and have instead aimlessly pointed fingers at each other trying to escape their responsibility as fertility providers,” according to the lawsuit.
“When I reunited with my partner a few years ago, we considered building a family together and the fact that I had taken the great time, energy and expense to safely store my oocytes made this a real possibility,” Cervoni, now 59, said in a statement provided by her lawyer, Jill Teitel.
The apparent loss of her oocytes is “devastating,” she said, adding “I am tormented by the fact that my oocytes were destroyed without my knowledge or my written consent which was required, sold to someone else, or sitting in storage somewhere unlabeled and unaccounted for.
“They have been negligent and uncaring about the most important property that I owned, it was my own tissue that I wanted to use when I was ready to.”
Cervoni, a management consultant, is seeking unspecified damages.
“Ms. Cervoni needed to rely on her doctors and facilities to abide by the law and treat her eggs with care, cryopreserve them properly, and keep proper records of them for future use,” Teitel said.
The fertility companies couldn’t be reached for comment.