Ethics expert says embryo-implant docs negligent
By David Weber
Friday, January 16, 2004
Boston Herald
A Harvard University medical ethics expert testified yesterday that two
doctors at a Boston in-vitro fertilization clinic were negligent for
failing to tell a former Wayland firefighter they were impregnating his
wife with a frozen embryo that had been fertilized with his sperm.
Richard Gladu is suing the Boston IVF clinic and two of its founding
doctors, Selwyn Oskowitz and Merle Berger, charging the birth sealed
the break-up of his marriage and plunged him into deep depression and
financial ruin.
Gladu's medical expert, Dr. Harold Bursztajn, testified the doctors ``departed
from accepted medical practice'' by not obtaining Gladu's explicit consent
before they thawed a frozen embryo and implanted it in his wife Dec.
28, 1995. Bursztajn said consent forms signed by Gladu and his wife before
a similar successful impregnation in 1993 were not sufficient to cover
the 1995 procedure.
"The forms do not indicate that the two parties (Gladu and wife
Meredith McLeod) who signed those forms gave consent to serial implantations," Bursztajn
testified.
As early as 1990, he said, the doctors were aware Gladu and his wife
were torn over the issue of having children despite their continuing
efforts to have a successful pregnancy.
"This should have been a red flag," Bursztajn testified.
Bursztajn, who is a psychiatrist and examined Gladu in preparation for
this Middlesex Superior Court trial, said Gladu suffers psychologically
because of the birth of his third child.
"Nothing brings tears to his eyes, nothing makes him as sad and
hopeless, as the conflicting feelings he has about (the child)," Bursztajn
testified.