Introducing: What Happened in Nashville

It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant.

Imagine pouring years of hope, trust, and your last dollar into a fertility clinic just to have your dream of a child halted in the middle of treatment. No warning, no explanation, no refunds.

We have some breaking news to tell you about. Tennessee's attorney

In April 2024, women arrived at the Center for Reproductive Health for scheduled IVF appointments.

Instead, the clinic was gone, shut down overnight, and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos. For many patients, their only chance at a family.

They were just going to ignore us. They weren't going to answer us.
They had truly closed their clinic. I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.

This is the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients left behind.

But it's also about an industry where profit often trumps protection and vulnerable families carry all the risk.

IVF today is far less regulated than virtually any comparable part of medical practice in the United States.

I'm Melissa Jeltson, and this is What Happened in Nashville, an investigative podcast from iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans.

Like my earlier true crime podcasts, What Happened to Sandy Beale, What Happened to Libby Caswell, and What Happened to Talina Czar, it's about women failed by the people and systems meant to protect them.

But this season, those failures go beyond the legal system to the medical field, and the very business of fertility.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are getting taken advantage of because we're desperate. And when no one else would step in, they banded together.

Strangers challenging an industry that's surprisingly underregulated and expanding rapidly. At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.

It feels like I just keep getting older and my embryos keep sitting in a tank.

This story touches anyone who's ever dreamed of having a child. And what's at stake isn't just a few families' futures.
It's whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.

This was our last chance, like the last of everything. The dream was over.

Listen to what happened in Nashville beginning December 3rd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.