Beginnings and Endings — Nashville E6

Transcript

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Speaker 21 You can't go through IBF and still be 100% the same person you were when you first started out. It's going to change you.

Speaker 22 I'm sitting with Sydney in her home outside of Nashville.

Speaker 25 She's holding her baby daughter who's giving me sweet eyes and dribbling on her bib.

Speaker 21 I know how lucky we are that we did have best case scenario and I know the others are still trying to get through and

Speaker 27 I just really hope for the best.

Speaker 20 My heart hurts for them.

Speaker 30 Sidney's daughter's name is Story for the story she represents.

Speaker 1 Sidney gave birth to her in May 2025, just a little over a year after the Center for Reproductive Health shut down.

Speaker 36 She was born from one of the embryos that Sydney managed to retrieve from the clinic right before it closed and the state took over control of the cryogenic tanks.

Speaker 21 We had gone back and forth and I was like, well, what if we name her story?

Speaker 25 She has such a story.

Speaker 21 We went through so much to get here to like this point from

Speaker 21 me having an ectopic pregnancy to going through all the things we did at the fertility clinic and she was our little embryo that could.

Speaker 21 I will definitely share all the things that we went through to have her one day and hope she knows like how

Speaker 21 wanted she was too.

Speaker 39 She's our best little sweet story.

Speaker 21 We love her to pieces.

Speaker 1 And maybe here is where those old fairy tales return.

Speaker 40 The ones where women sacrifice everything for a child.

Speaker 43 For Sydney, her fertility journey was a wild and unpredictable experience.

Speaker 43 She lived through a breast fallopian tube, surgeries, an egg retrieval, an embryo rescue mission, and multiple transfers before she got her happy ending.

Speaker 21 Honestly, the baby snuggles are unmatched.

Speaker 21 I love a good baby snuggle with a little nap, but it's all so sweet. And I know that even though sometimes the days are long and I don't get the most sleep, that it's going to pass by so fast.

Speaker 21 And she'll be going to school and everything before before I know it. So I'm just trying to soak it all up.

Speaker 48 I'm Melissa Jeltson from School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 49 This is what happened in Nashville, episode 6, Beginnings and Endings.

Speaker 51 When Sydney had story, it felt like there was finally some good news after the abrupt closure of the Center for Reproductive Health.

Speaker 33 Though even this happy outcome came with a bittersweet edge.

Speaker 53 She was the only patient, as far as I could tell, who managed to get her embryos out before the clinic shut down, which meant she got a head start on moving and using them.

Speaker 46 For everyone else who had embryos in storage, they had to wait from April to November, about seven months.

Speaker 55 And by then, Sidney was already three months pregnant.

Speaker 44 She told me she felt terrible about that, almost a sense of survivor's guilt, that she was able to move forward while others were stuck in limbo.

Speaker 44 So she was careful about what she shared publicly in the Facebook support group.

Speaker 32 wanting the focus to remain on the patients with more pressing needs.

Speaker 21 It made me extremely nervous, like to share, just because I know what that feels like.

Speaker 21 It's a gut punch, you know, to see other people experience pregnancy while their embryos are still being inventoried.

Speaker 58 I would never want to hurt their feelings.

Speaker 29 But she did confide in one person, another former CRH patient, Mary.

Speaker 21 Having Mary like completely changed everything for me because like I had somebody to talk to that not only like listened, but actually like understood, completely understood.

Speaker 21 I will say that the people that you do meet while going through IVF are some of the best people. So that's one thing that I'm thankful for that because of this, because of what Dr.

Speaker 21 Vasquez has done, I will have lifelong friends like Mary.

Speaker 28 As you may remember, Mary was the woman who had an appointment the same morning as Sidney, but wasn't told about the clinic's imminent closure.

Speaker 29 Like so many others, Mary had embryos in storage, trapped behind closed doors and procedural red tape.

Speaker 1 Her dilemma, which Mary spoke about on the news, caught the attention of another local couple who offered to donate their unused embryos to her.

Speaker 54 Running out of time and patience, Mary used them.

Speaker 59 And it worked.

Speaker 36 She got pregnant.

Speaker 41 And because Mary's son was premature, she actually gave birth a few weeks before Sydney.

Speaker 60 He's a five and a half months, and he just learned how to roll over from his back to tummy. So now he's just kind of rolling all over the place.
So that's really cute.

Speaker 7 When I talked to Mary in the throes of new parenthood, I was struck by just how different she seemed.

Speaker 42 During most of our conversations over the past year and a half, she'd been angry, frustrated, and sad.

Speaker 42 Now she had a lightness about her.

Speaker 34 She was smiling.

Speaker 60 He has the best belly laughs. His armpits are really ticklish.
And so he does this like big belly laugh when you tickle him.

Speaker 60 And it just is like, it makes you laugh so hard you cry because it's the cutest thing you've ever like.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 60 I'm, I spend every minute I can on the floor with him just like doing tummy time, talking, playing. And

Speaker 60 everything about him is just the best.

Speaker 22 Motherhood has reshaped Mary's life in ways she's still processing.

Speaker 60 I don't even know how to explain it. It's everything and more.
It's probably more.

Speaker 60 I mean, it's exhausting, but like in the best way.

Speaker 60 I just, I love it. I love every aspect of it, all the stages.

Speaker 25 After the Center for Reproductive Health shutdown, Mary became a patient at a different fertility clinic, the Nashville Fertility Center.

Speaker 58 which was where she had her embryo transfer.

Speaker 25 With everything Mary and her husband had been through, establishing care somewhere new required a leap of faith, a willingness to trust again.

Speaker 31 But the new clinic made it easy.

Speaker 25 Almost immediately, she told me the difference in care felt unmistakable.

Speaker 60 I mean, the Nashville facility center, it's just, you know, the nurses call you back same day.

Speaker 60 The doctors care so much. When we went for my first appointment with them, the doctor told me that he had spent two hours on the weekend reviewing my file before my appointment.

Speaker 60 And he wrote up notes from my experience before even talking to me to feel like he was also coming in prepared instead of just being hit with a thousand pages of medical records.

Speaker 60 So he really took the time on his days off even to prepare for our appointment. And to me, I will never forget that.

Speaker 47 Now, with fertility care she feels she can trust, Mary wants to try for another baby soon.

Speaker 57 She finally has access to the two embryos she and her husband had in storage at CRH.

Speaker 25 The ones created with donor eggs and her husband's sperm.

Speaker 60 Morty's so ready to do another transfer. I'm like,

Speaker 60 you know, we're planning on doing one in February. So we just got cleared actually.
Actually, today I had appointments and we just got cleared and everything looks really good.

Speaker 60 So we're going to move forward in February with another one with our actual embryos.

Speaker 27 Since Mary successfully got pregnant and gave birth from her first embryo transfer with the Nashville Fertility Center, she's hopeful about her chances of doing it again.

Speaker 1 But she still worries that her two embryos that were trapped at CRH after it shut down might have been compromised while stored there or during the transport process.

Speaker 60 Will a part of me always feel like if this doesn't work, it's because of how they were taken care of? Absolutely. That is something I'll have to work through.
That anger, that sadness.

Speaker 60 I'm trying to learn how to process that still, but it's getting there.

Speaker 25 Beyond the immediate concerns about her embryos, her quick success with the Nashville Fertility Center also raises a bigger, more painful question.

Speaker 2 Mary can't help but wonder, would things have turned out differently if she hadn't started her IVF journey at the Center for Reproductive Health?

Speaker 25 She did two IVF cycles with Dr.

Speaker 2 Vasquez, ending up with just one embryo, an embryo that didn't implant.

Speaker 2 After that, she says, she was encouraged to move on to donor eggs and told that her own genetics were likely the issue.

Speaker 47 But what if that wasn't true? She can't stop thinking about whether she might have conceived sooner and with her own eggs if she'd been at a different clinic from the beginning.

Speaker 60 Even the specialty doctor I'm with now at the Nashville Fertility Center, we had a really long meeting a month ago and she was just like, I really think you could be successful if we did a round of IVF, like using the protocols here.

Speaker 60 She wished we had the money to do a round because she feels that we could be more

Speaker 60 successful with having a baby with both our genes.

Speaker 37 But another round of IVF is not in the cards for the couple.

Speaker 64 If the two embryos they already have don't work, they've agreed that they'll be done with fertility treatments.

Speaker 60 We've put so much of our money, like we, we can't move into a bigger house because, I mean, we just we've poured every year's worth of my husband's Christmas bonuses into fertility for six years.

Speaker 60 If we keep going, we're gonna take away from our son.

Speaker 60 It's gonna take away from him if I'm at appointments all the time or if I'm on, you know, hormone treatments and not in, you know, they don't make you very fun.

Speaker 60 And just the expense of it all takes away from us being able to like move forward in our lives.

Speaker 60 So it's not just about me and my husband anymore.

Speaker 35 Mary's not the only one left with lingering what-ifs.

Speaker 41 Over the year and a half I spent reporting this case.

Speaker 55 I heard it again and again from other patients.

Speaker 20 Would our story have been different at another clinic?

Speaker 56 The truth is, there's no easy answer.

Speaker 27 Even with excellent doctors, well-trained staff, and impeccable care, not everyone succeeds with fertility treatment.

Speaker 35 There's that nearly 25%

Speaker 25 who try for years, but never end up with a child.

Speaker 32 Sometimes there's simply no clear explanation.

Speaker 2 You can't necessarily tell if you're unsuccessful because of bad luck, biology, or if the care you got wasn't very good.

Speaker 43 Even for women who ultimately did have a child at CRH, there are stubborn questions about the quality of care they received.

Speaker 25 Here's Kristen Wall, who we heard from in episode four. She and her wife had gone to CRH for reciprocal IVF.

Speaker 7 I immediately just started questioning everything.

Speaker 7 I

Speaker 4 was

Speaker 66 concerned about the care I received, and I honestly thought, like,

Speaker 7 would my outcome have been different had I gone somewhere else?

Speaker 41 Kristen's first transfer with Dr.

Speaker 25 Vasquez when she was 29 years old ended in a miscarriage.

Speaker 42 For her second transfer, the clinic recommended she transfer two embryos at once, a practice that has largely fallen out of favor for healthy, younger patients like Kristen.

Speaker 58 They were really pressuring us into transferring two embryos.

Speaker 68 I never, I didn't want to.

Speaker 7 I was really vulnerable at that time and really upset.

Speaker 66 And hindsight, I probably shouldn't have jumped into a transfer so quickly afterwards, but I did.

Speaker 66 And

Speaker 66 I was like, yes, do it. Like, just do it because they were pushing me to and I was terrified.

Speaker 28 As you may remember, both embryos implanted and Kristen became pregnant with twins.

Speaker 40 But soon after, she had a type of miscarriage called vanishing twin syndrome.

Speaker 47 when she lost one of the embryos in utero.

Speaker 28 This was exactly the type of thing she'd been wanting to avoid avoid and why Kristen had resisted the idea to transfer to in the first place.

Speaker 42 These back-to-back losses impacted her deeply.

Speaker 28 Then add on to all of that, the abrupt closure of the clinic where she'd successfully conceived her child and the confusion in the months that followed.

Speaker 67 I've been in therapy this whole last year, like for that specific reason, because I do feel such conflicted feelings about everything because on one hand,

Speaker 67 I have a child and that's what we wanted and she's beautiful and healthy and happy.

Speaker 67 And on the other hand, I feel a little bit robbed of that experience because I feel like I spent the first year of her life going through this really traumatic event and having to deal with it.

Speaker 25 Recently, Kristen went to another fertility clinic as she and her wife are getting ready to try to expand their family once more.

Speaker 51 There, she discovered she had a condition called low protein S, which can cause blood clots and early miscarriages.

Speaker 43 Her new doctor told her that she would proactively be put on a blood thinner after she does her next embryo transfer to help prevent miscarriages.

Speaker 47 But as far as Kristen can remember, this issue never came up at CRH.

Speaker 28 She doesn't think they tested for it.

Speaker 25 It's possible she has developed it since.

Speaker 36 But still, the question remains.

Speaker 28 She had two miscarriages at CRH.

Speaker 24 Could those have been avoided?

Speaker 53 Despite the challenges she faced, Kristen is now a mother because of CRH and Dr.

Speaker 37 Vasquez.

Speaker 34 And she's grateful.

Speaker 67 And so I've really been trying to come to the understanding with myself that it's okay to have two feelings at once.

Speaker 67 It's okay to be happy that that happened and also really frustrated and sad that the other thing happened as well. And I understand that my story is my story and it's what led me to my child.

Speaker 67 And if I'm being perfectly honest, I would go through it all again just to have her.

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Speaker 98 I cannot think of another

Speaker 98 situation in life where you are in a absolute cycle of hope and despair, and hope and despair and hope and despair and hope and despair every single month, time after time.

Speaker 98 It's so much to bear.

Speaker 65 I returned to Nashville in September 2025, a year and a half after the clinic closed, to check in on the people I'd been following.

Speaker 33 I had planned to get together with Sidney, Mary, and both their babies.

Speaker 59 but Mary had to cancel at the last minute as she and her baby had hand, foot, and mouth disease, mom problems.

Speaker 44 But I did get the chance to see other CRH patients, like Sarah and Penny.

Speaker 50 They were two of the women who had undergone IUIs at the clinic with Dr.

Speaker 52 Ferrer Dyer, a man they say they only later learned did not have a medical license.

Speaker 48 We met at Sarah's house, the same place we'd sat together the year before.

Speaker 62 back in 2024.

Speaker 25 That was the same trip when we unsuccessfully tried to talk to Dr. Vazquez at the hearing.

Speaker 62 Since then, both women had moved to a new clinic and gone through a full round of IVF.

Speaker 54 Neither yet had a child.

Speaker 52 Whatever early optimism they once had, the belief that treatment might be straightforward or quick, had been discarded.

Speaker 27 Here's Sarah.

Speaker 98 The last year has been extremely difficult.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 98 took some time to

Speaker 98 focus on my health, lose weight, and then do IVF.

Speaker 2 We

Speaker 98 had a family member, my aunt, generously offer to pay for IVF for us. And so we were able to do it.
And

Speaker 98 first protocol wasn't right. So we had to stop it halfway through, start over with new meds.
Second protocol, everything was perfect. I had tons of follicles.

Speaker 98 And when they got in there to do the the egg retrieval, they couldn't get to over half the eggs because of a fibroid that had grown.

Speaker 7 We got nothing out of it.

Speaker 98 So we have no embryos.

Speaker 98 We don't really know what our next steps are going to be right now. We're weighing multiple options.
Going into another egg retrieval feels

Speaker 98 very scary.

Speaker 2 I don't.

Speaker 98 I don't, I honestly don't think that I can mentally or physically make it through another failed egg retrieval.

Speaker 34 I asked Sarah how this experience, the clinic's collapse and everything that followed, had affected her.

Speaker 98 I think I

Speaker 98 was so focused at a certain point on the betrayal and the mistrust and how could somebody do this. And obviously that's never going to go away.
That's always going to be there.

Speaker 98 But at this point, it's figuring out how to not let that take life away from me.

Speaker 2 Even when everything goes the way it's supposed to, Sarah told me, fertility treatment changes you.

Speaker 98 This journey is one that people go on and they don't realize what's going to happen.

Speaker 98 You are never going to be the same person you were before this. Your husband's not going to be married to the same woman that he's married to before you started fertility.

Speaker 98 I spent the first two years of us doing treatments just like, I've got to get back to myself. I've got to get back to myself.
But that's not reality. I'm a different person and that's okay.

Speaker 98 And I need to find out who she is. And that's what I've spent the last eight or nine months doing.

Speaker 24 Sarah said she'd reached a point where she could think about life beyond treatment and what it might look like if IVF didn't work.

Speaker 98 If we get to the end of this and we don't end up with a baby, then we'll move on and we'll have a happy life and we'll adopt 100 cats and animals and we'll have a big farm and it'll be fabulous.

Speaker 98 It's not the end of the world.

Speaker 98 It was at one point the absolute end of the world for me not to be a mom. But I also have come to realize that just because I don't have a child of my own doesn't mean that I don't get to be a mom.

Speaker 98 I still have two wonderful little nephews. There's kids in the neighborhood that I, every single kid in the neighborhood comes to our front porch.

Speaker 98 I'm a mom to whoever needs it.

Speaker 34 When Penny arrived at Sarah's house, still in scrubs from her job at a lab, she told me that she too was finally learning to live with everything that happened at the Center for Reproductive Health.

Speaker 61 I mean, I think at this point, it's kind of wild to say, but I think I've kind of moved past it.

Speaker 61 They never came out and said sorry for anything, but I think in my mind, I have to just forgive them and move on.

Speaker 65 And she had cautiously good news to share.

Speaker 64 After the clinic closed, she had moved on to another fertility clinic in Nashville, where she had an egg retrieval.

Speaker 25 Her first embryo transfer ended in a chemical pregnancy.

Speaker 64 But her second had stuck so far.

Speaker 24 By her count, she was five weeks pregnant.

Speaker 65 Still, she wasn't celebrating yet.

Speaker 42 She was too worried about the potential of losing the pregnancy.

Speaker 61 I think I'm because I've had two miscarriages. It's almost like I'm not pregnant because you don't want to get your hopes up and then shot down.
So it's almost easier in my mind to just count it out.

Speaker 61 So then if anything good happens, you're on the positive side of that. But until I'm holding a baby, I think I'm going to be skeptic.
I think that's the reality of it. I still test every day.

Speaker 61 I make sure the line's there, which is kind of wild because it doesn't really get darker after a certain point and you kind of just start to lose your test line.

Speaker 61 But I think I'm going to be like that until the day that I actually give birth. I think that's the reality of it.

Speaker 61 I'm trying to tell myself not to stress it one way or the other because I can't control it one way or the other.

Speaker 47 Sadly, Penny was right to guard her heart.

Speaker 42 Three weeks later, I got a text from her.

Speaker 25 At Penny's eight-week appointment, she'd found out the baby had no heartbeat.

Speaker 45 She'd had another miscarriage.

Speaker 40 At the time this episode comes out, December 2025, the state's case against Dr.

Speaker 1 Vasquez and the Center for Reproductive Health is still active.

Speaker 62 In the beginning, the focus had been on protecting genetic material and securing patient records.

Speaker 22 Since then, the case has slowed to a crawl.

Speaker 33 There's still some hope that patients might eventually receive financial restitution, but so far, no one has seen a dime.

Speaker 51 I keep thinking about what accountability could even look like for people whose fertility journeys were disrupted at such a crucial point.

Speaker 50 Many patients told me they felt like the lawsuit didn't truly acknowledge the reality of what had been taken from them.

Speaker 25 The framing as a consumer protection case felt almost absurd to them.

Speaker 46 A legal category meant for knockoff products and false advertising was being used to explain what had happened to their bodies, their embryos, their mental health, their families.

Speaker 12 That's the model. It does not afford any recognition for the more profound nature of the loss.

Speaker 44 Here's legal scholar Dove Fox again.

Speaker 12 It says that you are a consumer and a business did not represent the truth of a product, whether it be a TV or nachos

Speaker 12 or whatever else.

Speaker 12 It doesn't recognize your stake in health care or reproductive hopes and dreams or family planning as anything that is special, that accordingly would merit either greater protections, more care, or more compensation.

Speaker 65 And yet, a consumer protection lawsuit is often the only legal path available in cases like this.

Speaker 26 Not because the harm is small, but because the law has almost no mechanism for recognizing what fertility patients actually lose when things go wrong.

Speaker 65 Fox calls this kind of harm reproductive negligence.

Speaker 12 The law just doesn't recognize the disruption of family planning as a legal cause of action. Our laws don't recognize those kinds of injuries as

Speaker 12 the sort that are either real or substantial enough for the law to care about, for courts to intervene in, to compensate people who are victims of misconduct.

Speaker 25 When the law frames these losses as simple consumer disputes, it misses their true weight.

Speaker 39 And that, says Fox, speaks to a larger unease in how the U.S.

Speaker 25 defines and values fertility treatment.

Speaker 12 We are really, really uncertain in this country with what it is and how we value it and how we treat it.

Speaker 12 Patients are left in the dark to plan a family at their own risk, to steal themselves against the consequences of the medicine and technology when it goes awry.

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Speaker 42 On my last morning in Nashville, I got up early and walked from my hotel room to the site of the former Center for Reproductive Health so I could see it for myself.

Speaker 1 I brought my toddler with me, pushing her in her stroller.

Speaker 30 The walk took about 30 minutes. As I got closer, the landscape shifted from coffee shops and student housing into a full-blown medical district.

Speaker 42 Suddenly, it was all tall buildings, neatly marked entrances, and the kind of parking lots that wrap around hospitals like a moat.

Speaker 42 I used to work at a children's hospital in Boston and the whole scene felt familiar.

Speaker 37 Everything about it projected competence and safety.

Speaker 26 It was the kind of environment where you'd go for an MRI or cancer treatment.

Speaker 59 I could imagine, as a patient of CRH, how reassuring it would have felt like you were in good hands.

Speaker 33 I found the right building and walked in without issue, jumped in the elevator.

Speaker 25 I got off on the fourth floor and immediately to my left, I saw the door to the now-closed Center for Reproductive Health.

Speaker 44 Through the glass, I could see a darkened lobby now empty of furniture.

Speaker 25 In the window, someone had taped a piece of paper explaining that the clinic was the subject of a state lawsuit and instructing patients elsewhere for more information.

Speaker 42 On the sign outside the clinic, the name of the practice had been removed.

Speaker 23 It's just blank now.

Speaker 25 After a year and a half of reporting the story, I still don't have answers to everything, but I do have a theory about what happened at the Center for Reproductive Health.

Speaker 65 It's not overly dramatic or conspiratorial.

Speaker 2 It's something far more ordinary and, in some ways, more unsettling.

Speaker 51 It's undeniable that over the years, Dr.

Speaker 22 Vazquez and his team helped women become mothers.

Speaker 25 There are many children alive today because of his work.

Speaker 46 But running a full-service fertility clinic is logistically complex and expensive.

Speaker 65 Dr. Vasquez had a clinical practice, an operating room, and a lab.
To keep it all going required constant coordination, careful record keeping, and layers of internal checks.

Speaker 32 CRH was essentially a one-doc shop.

Speaker 37 Dr.

Speaker 64 Vasquez wasn't part of an academic center or a multi-physician practice.

Speaker 2 He didn't have the built-in safeguards that come from working alongside other leaders and medical peers,

Speaker 65 the people who challenge your decisions, flag problems, and keep standards tight.

Speaker 34 I don't think this is a story of intentional wrongdoing.

Speaker 53 I think it was a slow, grinding collapse, a clinic that fell behind.

Speaker 2 a physician without adequate support, and no one around to intervene before the consequences shut everything down.

Speaker 46 That doesn't excuse what happened, but it does help explain how a place meant to create life could unravel the way this one did.

Speaker 53 In the end, I'm left with the belief that what happened in Nashville could happen somewhere else and probably already has.

Speaker 53 Even in the course of reporting this story, I've met women who've had similar, though not exactly the same, events occur at their clinics.

Speaker 2 One told me her fertility clinic merged with another and she lost access to her embryos for about a year, with the clinic even telling her at one point they didn't know where they were.

Speaker 46 A year of her fertile window spent just waiting, hoping to get them back.

Speaker 49 So if the same kinds of errors and missteps are happening across the IVF industry, often going unreported and undetected, then there's a bigger issue here.

Speaker 63 One that should worry anyone who's looking to go into fertility treatment.

Speaker 28 How can we prevent these mistakes and protect the patients who are risking everything?

Speaker 100 The question is how much regulation of those clinics do we want?

Speaker 51 This is Naomi Khan, legal scholar and author of Test Tube Families, Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation.

Speaker 100 As someone who clearly sees the need for more oversight, I recognize there's also the chance, particularly in a post-Dobbs

Speaker 100 world where we are concerned about over-regulation of the fertility space.

Speaker 100 On the other hand, there's also the concern that you don't want fertility clinics to be using outdated procedures or medical equipment or outdated practices. And so

Speaker 100 it's difficult to strike that middle line.

Speaker 56 Still, she believes there are many improvements that can be made.

Speaker 100 I would be looking for mandatory reporting of errors, not just to a regulatory agency, but also to the individual patients.

Speaker 100 I'd also be looking for more insurance coverage of infertility-related issues, and I would be looking for making some of the voluntary guidelines mandatory.

Speaker 100 For example, with respect to donated gambling, there's no requirement that fertility clinics follow up and check on any of the information that is reported to them by the individual donor.

Speaker 46 Kahn also stresses the importance of patient education and transparency around assisted reproduction.

Speaker 100 Better oversight just of the informed consent process at fertility clinics would be helpful.

Speaker 100 We need to make sure that people understand just what the risks are, both in the procedure as well as in ultimately producing a douncing baby at the end.

Speaker 100 And so ensuring that deceptive practices or misleading claims are not made about these services seems to be incredibly important.

Speaker 100 There are some professional guidelines and some state requirements on this, but again, there's no federal, we have no uniformity on this.

Speaker 25 But there are risks to any regulation. For example, costs for everyone, doctors and patients alike, could increase.

Speaker 37 And then there is, as Khan mentions, the concern that greater government involvement could inadvertently imperil the IVF industry.

Speaker 25 Many IVF advocates here in the U.S.

Speaker 37 fear that bringing more scrutiny to a practice that involves creating embryos could backfire, leading to new restrictions that hurt both patients and providers.

Speaker 2 And their worries aren't hypothetical.

Speaker 22 Just a few months before CRH shut down, the Alabama Supreme Court made headlines by ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children under state law.

Speaker 54 The case stemmed from a wrongful death lawsuit.

Speaker 37 brought by families whose embryos were destroyed while in storage.

Speaker 44 The ripple effects were immediate.

Speaker 65 IVF clinics across Alabama paused services, afraid they could now face criminal or civil liability for routine parts of treatment, like discarding non-viable embryos or even freezing them.

Speaker 54 And Tennessee has been navigating that same tension.

Speaker 15 This bill is something that I have been working on with legal and stakeholders for the last several months.

Speaker 15 It has been a difficult and challenging journey trying to find information regarding what minimum standards are, what the regulations are, what the

Speaker 15 federal statute requires as it relates to the practice of ART, which is assisted reproductive technologies.

Speaker 46 That's Ryan Williams, a Republican state lawmaker, addressing a subcommittee of the Tennessee House.

Speaker 25 Nearly a year after CRH shut down, Williams introduced a bill he said would strengthen oversight of fertility clinics, especially in the wake of what happened at the Center for Reproductive Health.

Speaker 15 The members may also know that the Attorney General is trying an open case now regarding a fertility clinic that closed abruptly in Nashville, and the reason for that concerns me a little bit.

Speaker 25 The bill would have created new licensing requirements for IVF doctors and clinics, but it also would have profoundly changed how IVF is typically performed, suggesting bans on genetic testing of embryos and capping how many embryos could be created per patient.

Speaker 53 The bill ultimately died in committee, and months later, Tennessee lawmakers passed a very different bill, one that explicitly protected access to IVF.

Speaker 52 But even that victory was uneasy.

Speaker 22 Some legislators immediately pushed back, arguing the state shouldn't endorse a practice practice that involves creating and discarding embryos.

Speaker 46 Within days, legislative leaders were already signaling that IVF would be back on the agenda next session.

Speaker 37 It was a reminder that the politics surrounding IVF aren't settled.

Speaker 63 Not in Tennessee, not in Alabama, maybe not in any state.

Speaker 64 While I was in Nashville, Sidney posted a question to the Facebook group she had started a year and a half before to connect former CRH patients to each other.

Speaker 21 It has been so quiet in this group, and I do wonder, you know, how everybody's doing, like, you know, what's the update?

Speaker 21 Because I had seen where a few had announced that they were pregnant, and then we haven't heard anything. So, just kind of like a check-in.

Speaker 25 So, I think I'm going to do that just to see how everybody's doing.

Speaker 34 The responses flooded in.

Speaker 33 Some former CRH patients had had babies, like her.

Speaker 35 Others were still trying at new clinics, hopeful that this next round of IVF, this next transfer, would be the one.

Speaker 59 And then there were women who'd stopped fertility treatments completely, even without success.

Speaker 2 Women like Erin Meyer, the North Carolina flower farmer who spent her retirement funds on embryos from Dr.

Speaker 25 Vasquez's agency.

Speaker 51 We're about a year and a half out from the initial trauma.

Speaker 68 It has shaped my trust, or it has shaken my trust, I would say, in healthcare and medical professionals.

Speaker 7 I don't trust that the industry is not out for the profit.

Speaker 68 They see desperation and they see dollar signs.

Speaker 25 I'm still very cynical.

Speaker 68 at this point.

Speaker 98 And personally,

Speaker 68 I'm done with IVF.

Speaker 68 I can't stomach any more of it. It's difficult physically, of course, and it's difficult emotionally going through it.

Speaker 68 But it's even more difficult when you don't trust the healthcare providers and you don't trust

Speaker 68 the honesty of the outcomes of what's going to actually,

Speaker 68 what the challenges are, what the outcomes might be.

Speaker 25 Erin and her husband are now considering adoption instead.

Speaker 68 At the end of the day, what we hope to have is a child to raise together

Speaker 2 and to have a fulfilling life where there's a little human

Speaker 68 being brought up that cares who we are and what happens to us and to have that experience of shaping a human together. And so adoption is the direction we're headed.

Speaker 2 Erin is not sure what to do with the embryos they obtained from CRH, the ones that her clinic of choice considered too poor quality to be used.

Speaker 68 Our embryos, technically, are in Tennessee still. We've taken responsibility for these two potential lives,

Speaker 68 but we don't trust the information on what is contained in these two embryos and

Speaker 68 what their chances are and what their issues are.

Speaker 1 It's left to us to figure out how, what happens to them.

Speaker 2 I don't know what to do with them.

Speaker 68 And so at this point, because our time is limited, we need to focus on how we are going to start a family now.

Speaker 50 And with time and healing,

Speaker 68 it will hopefully become more clear what we want to do with those embryos.

Speaker 38 Looking back, Erin knows she can't change what happened at CRH,

Speaker 52 but she hopes what she learned can spare someone else the same pain.

Speaker 68 Anybody coming into IVF, I want this to be a cautionary tale. If I knew what I know now and was starting over at a younger age, I would have gone to the best clinic.

Speaker 68 If you're going to do this, if you're going to go through IVF,

Speaker 68 go with a clinic that has a reputation for success. Do your research.

Speaker 68 Ask hard questions. Don't take things for granted that you're old and you're like that doesn't quite make sense

Speaker 54 after everything that happened at crh erin is left feeling frustrated not just by what she went through but by how few legal avenues exist for patients like her

Speaker 45 she believes choosing dr vazquez's services changed the entire course of her reproductive life.

Speaker 50 And it feels like no one will have to answer for that.

Speaker 68 I don't foresee there being any punishment.

Speaker 27 She had wanted to bring her own civil lawsuit against Vasquez to hold him to account for what she believes he took from her, her opportunity to birth the baby herself.

Speaker 25 Ultimately, though, she gave up on that idea too.

Speaker 64 It seemed her chances of success were too low for the financial cost she'd have to expend.

Speaker 22 I spoke with a number of other patients who came to the same conclusion.

Speaker 30 They feel profoundly impacted by the clinic's closure, but their resources are limited.

Speaker 37 They're still navigating that tense balance of time and money, hoping to get pregnant before their biological clock runs out for good.

Speaker 68 When you're talking about women and families that are spending so much energy trying to start a family and navigate all of the components that come with that and navigate the trauma, all the stuff that happened.

Speaker 68 The reality is nobody has that sort of bandwidth to go after him in that way.

Speaker 68 I don't know what the end game is. I don't know how the chapter closes.

Speaker 41 With no resolution in sight, Erin remains in the uncomfortable uncertainty of not knowing how her journey to parenthood will resolve.

Speaker 25 She made the same sacrifices familiar to any fertility patient, and yet, three years after she started at CRH, she doesn't have her fairy tale ending.

Speaker 43 Erin has already gambled so much.

Speaker 40 How many bargains can one person make?

Speaker 25 It's wasted time, wasted resources, wasted dreams.

Speaker 67 I mean, it's

Speaker 68 real, real consequences.

Speaker 25 What Happened in Nashville is a production of School of Humans and iHeart podcasts, written, reported, and hosted by me, Melissa Cheltson.

Speaker 45 Our producer is Edelise Perez. Our senior producer is Amelia Brock.

Speaker 101 With additional production by Emily Seiner and Carl Cadel.

Speaker 101 Theme song by Jesse Nye Swanger. Sound design, scoring, and mixing by Jeremy Thal and Jesse Nye Swanger.

Speaker 25 Fact-checking by Savannah Hughley and Austin Thompson.

Speaker 45 Our production manager is Daisy Church.

Speaker 101 Executive producers are Jason English, Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and Elsie Crowley.

Speaker 45 If you're enjoying the show, tell everyone you know and don't forget to leave a rating in your favorite podcast app.

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