Northwestern Memorial Hospital is facing multiple lawsuits after failing to keep the sperm of 40 men frozen, destroying any chance for them to become biological fathers.
There were reportedly 40 lawsuits filed Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of men who lost their opportunity to become fathers due to illness or injury, according to the Chicago Tribune. The hospital and Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation, technicians who operated the tanks were listed in the lawsuit.
The names of the patients suing were not listed to protect their rights. The hostpital staff is accused of not properly monitoring the equipment used to keep the sperm frozen. The incident occurred in April of 2012, and the department notified 250 patients when they found out.
"The sperm that had been banked there was their one and only shot for most of them or many of them to have a biological family of their own," Matthew Jenkins, an attorney working on the cases, told the Chicago Tribune.
Hospital officials released a statement in response to the lawsuits saying, "we deeply regret that this equipment malfunction occurred." The statement said specimens in the faulty tank were immediately transferred to another working tank, according to UPI.com.
However, the lawsuit claimed they were negligent because there were "numerous additional tanks" available, and the hospital should not have put all the samples in one tank.
"It's a no-brainer that we learn in kindergarten that you're not supposed to store all your eggs in one basket," Jenkins told the Chicago Tribune. "They were taking vials - multiple vials from people who were banking sperm under these terrible circumstances - and putting them all in one tank when they had many tanks available to them."
The patients suing the hospital have decided not to speak about the lawsuit publically, according to Jenkins.
"Not everybody wants the outside world, the local Chicago community, to know what sort of medical treatments they were going through, how tough chemo was and all those sorts of things, and that's why they all chose to file, for us to file on their behalf, as John Does," Jenkins said.
