Fertility clinics in San Francisco and Cleveland, Ohio are facing lawsuits for allegedly destroying frozen embryos and eggs.
They said equipment malfunctions are to blame.
KVUE spoke with fertility centers here in Austin to find out the safeguards in place.
Texas Fertility Center lab director Tex VerMilyea said each of their 14 liquid nitrogen tanks has a monitoring system. The 24-hour system checks temperature.
The specimens are held in liquid nitrogen, as opposed to nitrogen vapor which evaporates faster than liquid.
"For utmost security, we keep all of our samples completely submerged in the liquid phase, which is the coldest phase,” said VerMilyea.
Texas Fertility Center director Kalyn Silverberg said not a lot of information on the incident has been released yet.
"So we really don't know yet what exactly happened,” he said. “It's hard to imagine that the tanks that we use on a daily basis would have malfunctioned because these tanks are made of stainless steel. They're reinforced. They've got layers of insulation; they're vacuum insulated as well. And so the odds of these tanks malfunctioning is relatively low."
But as prevention, the fertility center said it has changed some practices since the lawsuit. Their on-call is expanded and they receive daily, documented reports rather than monthly reports.
"Technically these are patients’ frozen assets,” said VerMilyea. “It’s my responsibility and that of my team to ensure we have the proper environment that these embryos, sperm and eggs can be used in the future."