NJ couple sues after years of failed IVF attempts at Manhattan clinic
An anguished New Jersey couple who struggled for years to start a family, losing 19 embryos, blame a bungling Manhattan fertility clinic, according to a lawsuit.
Christopher Mooney, who works in real estate finance, and his wife Nicole underwent dozens of procedures trying to get pregnant, some leaving Nicole so ill she was “walking into walls,” their filing alleges.
After having 13 egg retrievals and making 15 attempts to transfer 20 embryos into either Nicole or surrogates, the Mooneys eventually had a son in September 2017, according to Manhattan Federal court papers.
But it wasn’t until they sought to have a second child and encountered more problems at the New York Fertility Institute — where doctors allegedly misplaced one of their healthy female embryos for more than 18 months — that the Mooneys sought out a different facility and uncovered a host of mistakes by the institute, they charge.
Their new doctors, shocked at how many of the couple’s healthy embryos created at New York Fertility failed to result in pregnancy, suggested the losses indicated problems with “lab procedures, biopsy process or the general care of the embryos,” according to court papers.
New York Fertility allegedly put Nicole Mooney on almost double the medicine typically prescribed, the Mooneys claim. When she complained of symptoms, they said it “was all in her head,” the suit claims.
The Montvale pair were both 31 when they tied the knot in the summer of 2014 and tried to start a family, but ended up at New York Fertility the following year, working with Drs. Majid Fateh and Khalid Sultan, who tout themselves online as “world-class leaders in fertility care for more than 30 years.”
“We fought for our family,” Nicole Mooney told The Journal News back in 2017 of the birth of their first son. At that point, the couple had already endured years of procedures and miscarriages.
The fight was much harder than it had to be, the Mooneys claim.
Time after time, the embryos the Mooneys created at the Upper East Side clinic either didn’t lead to pregnancy, or resulted in biochemical miscarriage, which occurs when the fetus is too small to appear on an ultrasound, they say.
One of the couple’s embryos died as it was being thawed, they claim.
They didn’t discover that New York Fertility had forgotten one of their healthy female embryos in a storage freezer until last year, when Nicole checked on two embryos being used with a surrogate.
“Dr. Fateh looked shocked and said that they were transferring the one healthy female embryo the plaintiffs had. This came as a surprise to plaintiffs as they were under [the] impression that they did not have any healthy embryos,” according to the lawsuit.
“Much confusion ensued, and it was unclear whether the embryo being transferred actually belonged to plaintiffs.”
The physicians eventually confirmed the embryos they were using that day did belong to the Mooneys, but the procedure didn’t result in pregnancy.
That’s when they ditched New York Fertility Institute for a different facility, where doctors used a new protocol meant to improve the quality of Nicole’s eggs, “which NYFI never suggested,” the couple charge.
They had their second son via surrogate almost immediately.
The couple, who declined to comment on the litigation, is seeking unspecified damages.
The doctors said they were unaware of the lawsuit, adding, “We are shocked and surprised by the allegations … We treat all our patients with the utmost care while maintaining the highest medical standards. We respect the privacy of our patients and, thus, we will not comment further.”