The frozen embryos of a 46-year-old woman who has no other chance to have children must be destroyed, a San Francisco judge has ruled.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the case of Mimi Lee, who created the embryos with her husband, Stephen Findley, before undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
It was expected that Lee, due to her age and the anti-hormone medications required for her treatment, would be rendered infertile, and the couple opted to undergo in vitro fertilization to increase their chance of having biological children.
At the time Lee and Findley, who met as undergraduates at Harvard University, signed an agreement that the embryos could be given to only one of them solely in the event of the other’s death.
Mimi Lee
They were to be “thawed and discarded” in any other circumstance, including divorce.
Findley filed for divorce in August 2013.
Lee brought the matter to court in an attempt to take advantage of her last chance to have biological children, arguing that the agreement that they signed was not legally binding.
Lee said that it ‘violated her right to have children’ but the Superior Court Judge, Anne-Christine Massullo, ruled that Lee ‘does not have a right to procreate with Findley.”
Massullo went on to say: “It is a disturbing consequence of modern biological technology that the fate of the nascent life, which the embryos in this case represent, must be determined in a court by reference to cold legal principles.
“However, only an infinitesimally small percentage of the four million frozen embryos currently in storage in the United States are destined to be implanted and brought to life.
“There must be rules to govern the disposition of the rest.”
Two of those four million embryos in storage were created by Modern Family star Sofia Vergara, who is in a similar dispute with her ex, Nick Loeb, who wants to bring them to life over her objection.
