Charlotte and Martino Ruiz spent nearly a year and four separate egg-retrieval cycles working toward the family of four they wanted, with a boy and a girl. Their first retrieval produced a single genetically normal male embryo, and they continued retrievals to obtain a female embryo before attempting a transfer. On November 21, 2024, as Charlotte arrived for the scheduled transfer, the couple says an embryologist at Aspire Fertility Institute lost that embryo in an instant, and it was never recovered.
The Ruizes have sued Aspire Fertility Institute, which is based in Houston, alleging the embryologist pressed the syringe holding the embryo and expelled its contents moments before the transfer was to take place, according to the lawsuit as reported by the San Antonio Express-News. Aspire staff reportedly searched the spilled fluid but could not recover the embryo, the lawsuit states. The couple was treated at Aspire's San Antonio and McAllen locations, according to the complaint, and the case was filed last month in state district court; as of Monday morning, court records showed Aspire had not yet been served.
The embryo at the center of the case was the only genetically normal male embryo the couple produced across a grueling fertility journey. Their first egg retrieval in December 2023 produced the lone normal male embryo that would later be lost. A second retrieval in March 2024 yielded no embryos that reached day five, and a third cycle in May was canceled outright after Charlotte did not develop enough follicles. A fourth retrieval in August 2024 produced three more embryos — one genetically normal and one described as mosaic — but, per the lawsuit, Charlotte had diminished ovarian reserve and an age-related reason to keep pursuing retrievals, underscoring how much rode on the embryo lost months earlier.
Contract Clauses at the Center of the Fight
The Ruizes are seeking more than $1 million in damages, citing emotional distress and the loss of reproductive choices, the lawsuit states. But their path to that recovery runs through contract language they are now trying to defeat. Aspire's patient agreement requires arbitration in Houston, limits damages for lost reproductive tissue to the cost of services rendered — excluding medication — and waives consequential damages, including emotional distress, according to the agreement cited in the suit. The Ruizes argue both the arbitration clause and the damages cap are unenforceable.
Attorney Adam Voyles, who represents the Ruizes and is based in Houston, said the contract could leave patients with only a small recovery and limits damages to service costs even in cases of serious malpractice. Voyles said he believes the damages limitation is unconstitutional. He also said Charlotte Ruiz experienced horrible mental and emotional distress and needed therapy to cope with the loss, according to the lawsuit. The Ruizes paid for Aspire's services out of pocket or through insurance benefits, the complaint notes.
Aspire declined to discuss the case, citing patient privacy and confidentiality, but said it remains committed to maintaining rigorous safety protocols to protect patients and reproductive tissue, per the same statement reported by the Express-News.
A Related Harris County Case Already Pushed Into Arbitration
The Ruizes' case is not an isolated dispute for Aspire. Ciji Flugence and Datechia Specht sued the clinic in Harris County in May, alleging Aspire disposed of nine embryos without valid consent — four of which, they said, were genetically normal. Flugence and Specht said partner-consent signatures and notary sections on the disposition forms were left blank, while Aspire's own records indicated the couple had approved the destruction and that consent had been properly witnessed. Flugence and Specht said they learned their embryos were gone in March 2025.
The Ruizes had actually joined that Harris County case as plaintiffs in June, but they dropped their claims from it on September 23 before filing their own separate San Antonio lawsuit. Two days later, on September 25, a judge ordered Flugence and Specht to arbitrate their claims and stayed their case pending that arbitration — an order that applied only to Flugence and Specht, not to the Ruizes, whose new case remains a separate matter.
The Harris County dispute traces back further, to a September 2024 lawsuit filed by five couples who accused Aspire Houston Fertility Institute of transferring dead or damaged embryos, as reported by the Houston Chronicle. That earlier suit sought more than $1 million in damages for each plaintiff and alleged Aspire failed to notify patients for months after a failure at its Piney Point laboratory between February and March 2024. Aspire attributed that failure to contaminated or defective freeze medium manufactured by CooperSurgical and said it identified a slight decrease in thawing survival rates for embryos frozen at the Piney Point lab between February 1 and March 14, 2024. The clinic told Houston Public Media it halted use of the vitrification media immediately upon identifying the potential issue. In a statement posted to its own site, Aspire Fertility Houston denied knowingly transferring non-viable tissue, calling the allegations false and defamatory, and said its pregnancy rates have consistently remained within industry averages. Separately, an insurer has asked a Texas federal court to determine whether it owes coverage for that underlying suit, according to Law360.
Why Embryo Disputes Keep Landing in Court
Cases like these are becoming more common as IVF use grows and the legal status of embryos remains contested. IVF typically involves creating multiple embryos, transferring only one or two, and discarding others because of chromosomal or genetic problems, according to Stateline. At least 10 states now have either fetal-personhood laws or wrongful-death statutes that could be read to include frozen embryos, the outlet reports, and an anti-abortion group has already sued seven Utah fertility clinics over embryo disposal under that state's wrongful-death law. Storing frozen embryos can also cost patients hundreds to thousands of dollars a year, adding financial pressure to an already fraught process.
