Celebrity-backed fertility clinic failures are destroying lives

A nationwide fertility clinic chain owned by Kindbody and backed by celebrity investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Chelsea Clinton, and Gabrielle Union, is coming under fire for errors and failures that are devastating families and destroying lives.

Founded in 2018 by Gina Bartasi, Kindbody is marketed as a modern, tech-savvy, spa-like fertility business. It’s even been dubbed “Instagrammable.” The business prides itself on being more accessible by making its services — egg-freezing, IVF — cheaper for companies to offer to their employees. In its first three years, Kindbody opened nine clinics and raised more than $123 million from investors that included Tesla and Lyft. But it wasn’t long before trouble started.

Understaffed and challenge-prone

Kindbody now boasts 33 fertility clinics, but many seem to be riddled with problems. At the Atlanta clinic, former employees say there were stretches of time during which only one embryologist was on site. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends at least two be present while eggs and embryos are being handled in order to avoid errors, but Kindbody struggled to staff its labs, according to employees. The Atlanta clinic also dealt with a collapsed ceiling and flooding caused by a failure of the HVAC system.

Kindbody’s Bryant Park location in New York City, meanwhile, accidentally defrosted an embryo a couple didn’t want to use. This points to the unethical nature of IVF: that a human child can be created out of an adult’s desires and then ignored as ‘unwanted,’ and the ease at which deadly mistakes can be made during the IVF process. While the woman ultimately moved forward with implanting that embryo, it didn’t result in a successful pregnancy. The Bryant Park location also destroyed at least two other embryos, and the mother in that case was never able to successfully become pregnant before she parted ways with Kindbody. The Bryant Park clinic also began dealing with a malfunctioning HVAC system in 2020, but before fixing the issue, reported Bloomberg, Kindbody went ahead and opened new clinics.

In its Austin location, a sewer pipe released gasses into the clinic and was left unrepaired for weeks.

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Loss of life

In March of this year, things seemed to get worse. A couple was told that their last remaining embryo — their last hope for having a biological child — had been mislabeled, and likely wasn’t their child at all. They had spent more than $30,000 on IVF with Kindbody, and were at the clinic for an implantation procedure when they were given the news. Eventually, genetic testing revealed that the embryo did belong to the couple, but that child was later deemed abnormal and was discarded.

“I went crazy just crying and crying,” the woman said. “It was our only opportunity.” Former employees have corroborated her story, and have shared their concerns regarding Kindbody anonymously, out of fear of retaliation from the company.

In addition to the mislabeling of this embryo, other embryos have been lost or accidentally destroyed, according to current and former employees. They have also voiced that the quality of care the Kindbody clinics provide is lacking, and that to meet its financial goals, Kindbody instructed staff to push pricey procedures.

Fertility is a $35.2 billion industry that is expected to grow to $84 billion by 2028. Doctors at Kindbody were allegedly given quotas to meet, and those quotas were tied to annual bonuses. If a clinic failed to meet its quota, it was told to increase the number of “dual stimulations” it was carrying out. Dual stimulation is when a woman undergoes two procedures to retrieve her eggs during one menstrual cycle. Dual stimulations are usually reserved for more difficult cases of infertility, or when a woman is attempting to freeze her eggs prior to cancer treatment. No studies exist to prove if it is safe for women, and hormone drugs used in the process of IVF have been linked to an increased risk of ovarian cancer.

According to research, women who had no live births by the end of their IVF attempts were at the greatest increased risk of ovarian cancer, which carries a 45% survival rate. Yet Kindbody, and perhaps other fertility clinics, are focused on profit.

Tracy Sosa, a former medical assistant who was assigned to the case in which Kindbody defrosted the so-called “wrong” embryo, explained, “Patients walk in enamored by the look of the place and think they’ll be taken care of. To the company, they’re just a number.”

Despite its challenges, Kindbody maintains that its average incident rate of 0.2% across all clinics is similar to that of other fertility businesses. It even claims a 63% success rate — compared to a 43% average of other fertility businesses. According to Penn Medicine, the national average of successful birth from IVF for women younger than age 35 on the first try is 55%.

Research shows that IVF destroys preborn children at a higher rate than abortion does — and some of that is due to the destruction of embryos. The procedure is carried out 2.5 million times a year around the world, but yearly, only 500,000 babies are actually born from IVF, according to Reproductive Biomedicine Online.

In addition, a report of clinics that are members of the U.S. Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) found that of the 91,090 IVF cycles using non-donor eggs in 2015, only 27,186 babies were born — about 30%. This shows that up to 75% of the human embryos created in the United States each year do not make it to birth. An estimated 1 million embryos are believed to be perpetually frozen in the U.S. — deemed unwanted by parents who are now unsure what to do with them. Dr. Craig Sweet runs a fertility clinic in Florida, and told the Associated Press in January 2019 that about 18% of his clinic’s frozen embryos had been abandoned – some for as long as 25 years. Just seven months later, he told NBC that the percentage of abandoned embryos in his clinic had risen to 21%.

Unfortunately, Kindbody’s struggles may not be unique. A Cleveland fertility business faced lawsuits after it lost 4,000 frozen eggs and embryos in 2020 and some couples have learned that the fertility doctor they trusted implanted the mother with another couple’s embryo/child. Based on the number of known instances in which embryos have been accidentally destroyed, misplaced, or implanted into the wrong woman, the issues Kindbody is experiencing are likely industry-wide, and Kindbody could simply be the fall guy for an unethical, billion-dollar industry that counts children as commodities.