Pearl - March 31, 2025


Modern Women HURT Themselves With Dumb Decisions ｜ Pearl Daily

Topics
IVF errors and lawsuits fertility switchup lawsuit embryos wrong embryo transferred in IVF fertility dilemmas and embryo decisions
Mentioned
Melissa Jason Diaz Alyssa Strauss Cal Hone Doug MPA Alexandria Preece Barlow Alexander Cardinale Jeffrey Steinberg Steven Casada Sherry Levitin Melania Trump Ani Minoukian Bradford Kolb Dick Brennan Chris Colfer Craig Sweet Pearl Reed Adam Wolfe Marissa Chelsea and 4 more
Modern Women Are Being REJECTED And Humbled For Being Selfish Female Content Creators Keep Burning Bridges ｜ Pearl Daily

Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

167.38

Word count

3,100

Sentence count

274

Harmful content

Misogyny

25

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

14

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about IVF mistakes and why women are suing each other and their partners for them. We also hear from a woman whose embryos were accidentally left in a lab by mistake, and a woman who was duped by a lab technician.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.120 Women make dumb decision, right? 1.00
00:00:02.540 And then the men watch it and they say, I can't stop them. 1.00
00:00:06.820 How can I make money off of this?
00:00:09.280 And do you know what happens?
00:00:10.760 Do you know what happens?
00:00:11.740 Then there's a whole industry that's born.
00:00:13.620 Like, for example, Melania Trump is passing like an anti-nude images on the internet. 1.00
00:00:19.580 So women take, send them around. 1.00
00:00:21.700 That's a risky decision, right?
00:00:24.200 You're trusting someone else to not share them.
00:00:27.400 We all know men have a hard drive.
00:00:29.140 We all know that you guys don't delete, okay?
00:00:32.700 They have it forever.
00:00:34.380 So knowing that, women can make the choice to not do it or know that it's a calculated risk. 0.99
00:00:41.080 Now, instead, if things get leaked on the internet again, what do women do? 1.00
00:00:45.500 They sue.
00:00:46.420 Now, what's Pixie suing Destiny for? 1.00
00:00:49.780 These all become industries of women making stupid decisions and men realizing they can 1.00
00:00:55.660 sue other people because women can't take accountability. 1.00
00:00:58.800 So it'll just be a lawsuit.
00:01:00.360 You know, it's the same thing with the marriage.
00:01:02.620 You know, women, you know, men know when they get married, it's a calculated risk. 1.00
00:01:07.180 It might work out.
00:01:08.040 It might not.
00:01:08.960 But women can't take that L, right? 1.00
00:01:11.280 They can't.
00:01:12.040 They don't.
00:01:12.460 Their reputation cannot be ruined.
00:01:15.660 So they got to make their ex-husband's life a living hell.
00:01:20.040 Okay.
00:01:20.720 So maybe if enough of us speak out, there will be more regulation.
00:01:25.100 There will be more protocol put into place, says Marissa, 36, who sued her LA fertility
00:01:30.980 clinic in the fall, alleging that the embryos she and her partner intended to use to start 0.94
00:01:36.180 a family has been, have been discarded by mistake.
00:01:39.800 That's my only hope.
00:01:41.280 How common are IVF errors?
00:01:43.220 It's a mystery.
00:01:43.980 Cal Hone was diagnosed in her teens with severe endometriosis, a condition that can make it
00:01:51.400 difficult to get pregnant. 0.99
00:01:54.000 By 35, she had completed three painful egg retrievals.
00:01:58.320 She and her partner, Steven Castaneda, were elated in late 2023 when they found out 16 of
00:02:05.260 her eggs had been successfully fertilized.
00:02:08.040 But days later, her doctor called.
00:02:10.140 He told me that all of my embryos have been discarded.
00:02:12.780 He described it as an error in the lab, she said.
00:02:16.420 I could barely speak.
00:02:17.600 The weight of my medical condition, the weight of the years I spent collecting those eggs.
00:02:22.140 I can't describe the rush of thoughts and the rush of emotions that overtook me.
00:02:27.040 I was just inconsolable.
00:02:30.500 Cal Hone's lawsuit alleges that a lab employee had failed to label her embryos before placing
00:02:36.260 them in an incubator, then threw away the unlabeled embryos.
00:02:40.960 The clinic said it could not comment on an active lawsuit but denied the allegations in
00:02:46.300 a court filing.
00:02:47.540 A conference between the judge and the opposing parties is scheduled for later this month to
00:02:52.180 determine next steps.
00:02:54.080 NBC's news analysis identified 82 lawsuits related to the allegations of human error from
00:03:00.300 2019 to 2024 and over 13 being swapped embryos, egg or sperm.
00:03:07.300 So yeah.
00:03:07.860 Yep.
00:03:08.320 The cases involving equipment and product failures, meanwhile, included 176 related to a 2018
00:03:15.120 storage tank failure at a fertility clinic in San Francisco called Pacific Fertility Center,
00:03:22.840 which led to the destruction of about 2,500 eggs and 1,500 embryos.
00:03:28.340 The tank's marker chart industries denied an allegation made in a class action suit that
00:03:34.420 the tank was defective.
00:03:36.100 The clinic's parent company denied allegations that it had been negligent.
00:03:41.900 Prelude and Pacific Fertility contend that the 2018 storage tank failure was caused by a
00:03:47.180 defective tank, said Alexandria Preece Barlow, an attorney who represented Prelude in a class
00:03:55.360 action suit.
00:03:56.680 Many of the allegations against the clinic have gone into arbitration.
00:04:00.780 However, in one that went to trial, a jury determined that the chart and the Pacific Fertility
00:04:07.200 Center had been negligent and awarded five former patients a total of $15 million.
00:04:12.660 Chart appealed and reached a confidential settlement in that case and others.
00:04:19.840 Chart, Prelude Fertility and Pacific Fertility Center did not respond to requests for comment.
00:04:25.340 However, the clinic told the NBC Bay Area shortly after the incident that it had bought and brought
00:04:32.980 in independent experts to investigate.
00:04:35.540 We are truly sorry that this happened for the anxiety that it will surely cause at the time.
00:04:40.600 50-plus other lawsuits in NBC's news analysis were related to claims that a liquid used to help
00:04:48.000 fertility eggs develop destroyed hundreds of embryos. 0.97
00:04:51.440 The company that manufactured the solution, Copper Surgical, received several lots last year.
00:04:58.140 Cooper Surgical did not respond to requests for comment in a statement to NBC last year.
00:05:04.000 It said that it intended to recall proactively while investigating any potential issues.
00:05:09.040 Okay, so, I mean, it just keeps going.
00:05:13.100 There is a bunch of issues that have been going on with IVF.
00:05:17.520 So we're going to watch a video of another embryo mix-up.
00:05:22.160 So let's see this.
00:05:23.380 An extraordinary fertility clinic mix-up is talking about what happened to them for the first time.
00:05:28.080 CBS 2's Dick Brennan has a story.
00:05:29.820 It was just, it was heartbreaking.
00:05:31.980 Ani and Ashot Manoukians say they've been devastated by what they call an unimaginable mix-up by the CHOP Fertility Center in Los Angeles involving three different couples.
00:05:41.460 CHOP with my family.
00:05:43.360 Pearl Reed on the website.
00:05:45.200 No one donates egg or sperm.
00:05:47.380 They are paid.
00:05:48.120 This is a big business and a disgusting business. 0.90
00:05:51.880 Through a living hell. 0.94
00:05:53.460 We're like zombies.
00:05:55.260 We could not sleep, eat, or focus.
00:05:57.780 We were helpless.
00:05:59.340 It was awful.
00:06:00.000 The Manoukians say the Fertility Center transferred their embryo to an unidentified New York woman who then gave birth to their son along with another couple's baby.
00:06:08.720 The New York couple is Korean-American and they were expecting to have two girls.
00:06:13.200 And they had two boys.
00:06:15.800 And Ani and Ashot's boy is Armenian.
00:06:18.820 A DNA test revealed the error and it was six weeks before the Manoukians finally got to see their son.
00:06:24.220 Now the couple is suing the center.
00:06:25.780 A child robbed me of my ability to carry my own child, my baby boy, to be with him in the first couple of, you know, moments of his life, to nurse him, to just do like skin-on-skin contact.
00:06:39.760 So how could this happen?
00:06:41.160 I am totally shocked and I am totally dismayed.
00:06:44.240 Fertility doctor Jeffrey Steinberg says a mix-up like this is extraordinary.
00:06:47.920 Before an embryo can go back into a patient, the computerized records have to be reviewed by the medical director, myself, and the physician if there's another physician involved.
00:06:58.380 The paper records have to be reviewed.
00:07:01.000 The signatures have to be reviewed.
00:07:03.040 And then the entire staff gets together and question the patient.
00:07:06.620 And further agonizing for the Manoukians, they say the fertility center never explained what happened to all of their embryos.
00:07:13.160 Ani and Ashot have no idea if there is another baby.
00:07:16.420 You see this?
00:07:17.180 This is called a shark.
00:07:18.780 This guy right there, he sees an up-and-coming industry.
00:07:23.260 He's like, I am going to get rich.
00:07:25.460 I am going to get rich off of these women's decisions. 1.00
00:07:29.020 In this world of theirs that they're unaware of right now.
00:07:32.880 Now, Ani Manoukian says her son that she was finally united with is, in her words, a perfect baby.
00:07:38.120 Attorneys for the clinic have not responded.
00:07:40.600 Yeah.
00:07:41.760 We got another one in Canada.
00:07:44.380 What was supposed to be one of the happiest moments of Alexander Cardinale's life, meeting his...
00:07:49.420 Oh, that's a cute baby.
00:07:50.900 ...baby happened four months late, thanks to an apparent mix-up.
00:07:55.100 I was in some kind of hell.
00:07:56.440 It was just getting worse.
00:07:57.480 In 2019, his wife Daphna gave birth to a baby that looked nothing like them.
00:08:02.880 They'd used in vitro fertilization and immediately feared something had gone wrong.
00:08:08.120 I think we were hoping if at least one of us was genetically related to her, then we could keep her.
00:08:15.540 But I think the biggest fear in all of this is, like, am I going to lose my baby?
00:08:21.480 According to their lawsuit, three months later, genetic testing showed their embryo had been switched with another couple's.
00:08:28.580 The solution? Legally exchange the children. 0.89
00:08:31.180 That our biological child was given to someone else, and the baby that I fought to bring into this world was not mine.
00:08:39.140 Can you imagine giving birth and it's not your... 0.95
00:08:42.060 Oh, 2025 is a weird year.
00:08:45.400 Thank you.
00:08:46.420 The couple is suing their L.A. fertility doctor, clinic, and lab.
00:08:50.640 The other family wants...
00:08:51.540 Who's the lucky lawyer?
00:08:53.660 Where is he at?
00:08:54.360 ...to remain anonymous, but reportedly plans to sue as well.
00:08:57.960 While cases like this have happened in the U.S. before, they are exceedingly rare.
00:09:03.840 But accidents happen, mistakes happen.
00:09:06.840 Fertility lawyer Sherry Levitin said... 0.97
00:09:08.840 There she is.
00:09:10.620 Yeah, she sees a cash grab.
00:09:12.580 The miraculous thing here is both women successfully gave birth and agreed to switch the baby.
00:09:18.060 Yeah, that is lucky.
00:09:19.100 Imagine giving birth, going through all that, giving birth to someone else's kid, and you get nothing.
00:09:25.600 Nothing.
00:09:26.080 Peace.
00:09:27.240 I understand that there are a hundred different horrible outcomes, and this was the least horrible
00:09:33.320 of all those outcomes.
00:09:35.540 The Cardinalis say their pain is eclipsed by that of their older daughter.
00:09:40.200 This ordeal has taken away everything.
00:09:43.380 That feels safe.
00:09:44.700 Mari says, you are not the father.
00:09:46.900 Then he says, you are not the mother.
00:09:48.920 L-O-L.
00:09:50.420 Thank you, Doug MPA.
00:09:51.680 Captain Nocap says women have betrayed their governments. 1.00
00:09:55.320 They're misled into thinking they can offset children until later.
00:09:58.280 The brutal reality is that after 25, they're passed halfway, with the second leg harder.
00:10:06.840 And has shaken her trust in us as parents.
00:10:09.800 Who can't possibly understand why she lost the little sister she'd grown to love.
00:10:15.040 Chris Glover, CBC News, Washington.
00:10:17.420 All right, let's see what we got next.
00:10:19.340 Another embryo mix-up.
00:10:21.160 A couple who dreamed of becoming parents to a healthy newborn, now suing their fertility clinic tonight.
00:10:25.980 They said the clinic implanted the wrong embryo, which has now put their child's life at stake.
00:10:31.180 Fox 11's Chelsea Edwards has the story.
00:10:34.200 We had visions of what his life was going to be like, living a normal life.
00:10:37.900 When Melissa and Jason Diaz decided to start a family, they were determined not to pass on certain cancer-causing genes that run on their families.
00:10:46.020 We wanted our children to not have any worry regarding these types of genetic mutations that we carry.
00:10:52.420 So we try to do everything in our power to give them a fighting chance that life with a healthy life.
00:10:57.940 So they chose to undergo genetic testing and in-vitro fertilization through Huntington Reproductive Center in Pasadena.
00:11:03.640 But attorneys say the wrong embryo was transferred to Melissa, which carried the rare and deadly cancer gene they tried to eliminate by going through IVF.
00:11:13.240 It breaks my heart.
00:11:13.960 Dang, all that money.
00:11:15.660 Just to know that he has to go through that when he didn't.
00:11:18.180 It wasn't his choice.
00:11:19.880 It was never supposed to be that way.
00:11:22.160 And you actively worked to prevent this exact situation?
00:11:25.020 One hundred percent.
00:11:26.180 Everything we could do that was in our power we tried to do.
00:11:28.520 Everything available from technology to date, we did.
00:11:33.320 And we followed all of their orders and everything that we needed to do.
00:11:37.060 Melissa first noticed the error on a medical report she requested from HRC about 10 months after her son was born in 2021.
00:11:44.260 Handwritten notes on that report indicated that the embryo, which became her baby boy, indeed carried the CDH1 gene, the very one that caused Jason's stomach cancer.
00:11:53.420 Thank you for the super chat, guys.
00:11:56.760 We're newly re-monetized on the channel, so every super chat does help.
00:12:00.920 Imagine not knowing if the baby is yours.
00:12:03.260 They must be so, that must be so hard for these poor women to deal with like, wow. 1.00
00:12:08.700 I don't feel bad at all, but I'm glad you have empathy, but I do not.
00:12:12.520 I was terrified.
00:12:14.380 My heart fell.
00:12:15.120 I was hoping it wasn't real, hoping it was a mistake.
00:12:19.360 When you first understood that the embryo that had been transferred did in fact carry that gene, what was your reaction?
00:12:26.280 I was devastated.
00:12:27.580 I felt like I was diagnosed with cancer for the second time again.
00:12:31.240 After requesting her full medical records from the clinic, Melissa says she received an altered version of the initial report.
00:12:37.260 The handwritten notes, gone.
00:12:39.200 On Wednesday, their attorney, Adam Wolfe, filed a lawsuit.
00:12:41.880 There's the next shark.
00:12:43.520 I'm telling you, these guys all look the same.
00:12:46.380 They are like, this is a booming industry.
00:12:49.060 Against the clinic and Dr. Bradford Kolb, claiming negligence, malpractice, battery, misuse of embryos, and fraudulent concealment.
00:12:56.980 And maybe by having this conversation right now, we can lend our little bit of support to changing processes, to changing regulations,
00:13:04.800 to having some sort of framework to minimize or hopefully completely eliminate.
00:13:09.640 When you think about it, women are the biggest eugenicists. 1.00
00:13:14.440 Like, women are the real racist sexists or whatever. 1.00
00:13:17.820 Like, they'll abort their kid if it's not the right dad or the right sex. 1.00
00:13:22.240 Like, they're the OG, like, eugenicists, when you think about it.
00:13:27.180 Ever happening again.
00:13:28.660 The Diaz's son is now a...
00:13:29.920 Men don't discriminate.
00:13:31.160 They'll nut in just about anything.
00:13:33.760 Do you know what I mean?
00:13:34.240 Like, they'll get...
00:13:35.580 Like, you ever see guys like baby mothers and you're like, why would you do that? 1.00
00:13:39.580 Like, you could have pulled out, you know?
00:13:43.120 But so when you think about it, like, women, yeah, there's a big focus on genes. 1.00
00:13:48.360 Amish have zero cancer, diabetes, autism, $250,000 control group.
00:13:54.240 It's not genes.
00:13:55.340 Well, yeah, but nobody wants to be Amish. 1.00
00:13:57.480 I mean, do you want to be Amish?
00:13:58.860 I'm not going to go be Amish. 1.00
00:14:00.500 So if you're not willing to go live like the Amish, I don't... 1.00
00:14:04.680 Like, no one's going to do it.
00:14:05.880 You're in my YouTube chat.
00:14:07.220 We're fat, okay?
00:14:08.240 That's why we have all this stuff.
00:14:11.140 We have old eggs.
00:14:12.240 The women... 1.00
00:14:12.640 We're having kids too old and we're fat.
00:14:14.440 That's the problem.
00:14:15.560 Happy and healthy one-year-old, but will face the life-altering stomach removal surgery
00:14:20.040 his dad underwent as a result of the embryo mix-up.
00:14:23.320 What would justice look like for the two of you?
00:14:25.580 I don't think there's anything that can justify what happened or what they did.
00:14:29.020 My son's still going to have the same future.
00:14:31.200 He's still going to have to live his life differently
00:14:33.780 because of something that we tried everything to prevent.
00:14:36.640 Reporting for Fox 11, I'm Chelsea Edwards.
00:14:39.620 Chelsea reached out to the Huntington Reproductive Center for a statement they have not yet.
00:14:44.900 That was almost ethical IVF.
00:14:47.120 I mean, I don't really have an opinion on it one way or another, but that was almost...
00:14:50.920 That's pretty understandable you don't want your kid to get cancer.
00:14:53.440 Fertility specialists using assisted reproductive technology to make the pregnancy dreams of 0.99
00:15:00.080 patients come true are now facing a new and complex ethical dilemma when it comes to what
00:15:05.980 to do with abandoned embryos.
00:15:08.280 None of us were really trained on what to do with this.
00:15:10.620 It's a dilemma.
00:15:12.180 It's a conundrum.
00:15:13.000 It's a problem.
00:15:13.600 During the IVF process, doctors often create multiple embryos,
00:15:18.440 which are then either implanted or frozen for use at a later time.
00:15:23.300 If a couple decides they do not need the remaining embryos, they have the following options.
00:15:28.340 They can destroy them, donate them to research or to another couple,
00:15:32.120 or continue to pay storage fees, which could run anywhere from $400 to more than $1,000 a year.
00:15:39.000 Yeah, so there's all these embryos that are just sitting, and none of these clinics know
00:15:43.700 what to do with them, and they're not federally regulated.
00:15:47.180 So what do you guys think realistically they're going to do with these embryos?
00:15:51.520 In many cases, patients stop paying their storage bills and stop answering calls,
00:15:56.560 leaving the clinics with what they call abandoned embryos.
00:16:00.200 If you talk to patients when they're thinking about having a child,
00:16:04.060 nobody thinks that they'll ever discard or abandon their embryos.
00:16:06.640 Dr. Craig Sweet runs a fertility clinic in Florida.
00:16:10.360 He says about a quarter of the frozen embryos at his clinic have been abandoned,
00:16:14.800 and according to experts, it's a problem in fertility clinics across the country. 0.98
00:16:19.400 Over time, more and more embryos have accumulated that have been abandoned.
00:16:24.540 I know of organizations that have vats of abandoned embryos,
00:16:28.820 and they're afraid to discard them.
00:16:30.920 It's unclear exactly how many frozen embryos have been abandoned nationwide.
00:16:35.940 Some doctors estimate the number to be in the hundreds of thousands,
00:16:40.520 while other studies suggest it could be in the millions.
00:16:44.120 Adding additional complications to the debate?
00:16:46.700 The fact that embryos are fertilized eggs, meaning they have a potential for life.
00:16:52.660 Alyssa Strauss and her husband turned to IVF to conceive their second child
00:16:57.260 after she was diagnosed with secondary infertility when her son was just five months old.
00:17:03.100 By the way, when women are infertile, if it's not endometriosis, 0.97
00:17:08.840 a lot of times they don't tell you this, it's an STD.
00:17:14.480 It's like HPV or some other STD that left them that way.
00:17:19.480 A lot of you guys get trapped where the woman says, oh, I'm infertile.
00:17:23.280 It's like, it might be that.
00:17:25.320 They were faced with the decision of what to do with their remaining embryos.
00:17:29.820 All of a sudden, you realize that you have these two things,
00:17:33.540 and they're the size of a poppy seed,
00:17:35.540 but at the same time, they're kind of the most important things.
00:17:38.900 Alyssa says she wasn't prepared to make the emotional decision.
00:17:43.020 I just wanted to be a mom with a new baby.
00:17:44.780 You know, you're talking to someone that's so desperate to have in the end just an embryo
00:17:50.460 that's going to work out for them, and to kind of bring up, you might have extra.
00:17:54.100 I don't know how you emotionally can handle that.
00:17:57.000 The Strausses ultimately decided to donate their embryos to research,
00:18:01.060 but it wasn't easy.
00:18:02.820 At some point, you're going to have...
00:18:03.840 Doug MPA says 15% of women will be infertile in the U.S.,
00:18:08.240 and 25% of female doctors are infertile. 0.97
00:18:10.800 Well, it's because they're throwing it back, you know, throwing it back raw.
00:18:14.780 They get too many gonorrhea diagnoses or whatever, and then boom.
00:18:21.920 And then now, women are giving birth to kids with STDs. 1.00
00:18:25.840 If you have an incurable STD that's going to be passed on to your kid,
00:18:29.220 you might as well just not have them.