Couple Back Home With Their Embryo

A smiling couple stepped off a commercial airplane at Los Angeles International Airport Monday night toting an unusual piece of carry-on luggage: a tan, two-foot-high tank containing a fertilized human egg.

The egg, produced by the woman and fertilized with sperm from her husband by an infertility clinic in Norfolk, Va., had been the subject of a four-month, cross-country legal wrangle.

Emerging from American Airlines Flight 75 from Washington, Risa Adler York and her husband, Dr. Stephen York, looked pleasantly surprised at the size of the crowd of reporters and camera crews that were there trying to catch glimpses of the unusual container and pressing the couple for details of their efforts to win “custody” over the fertilized egg from the Howard and Georgeanna Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine.

Couple Delighted

“We’re delighted to be back home,” Stephen York said, his arm around his wife.

“This has been quite an ordeal for us,” he said. “But at last we have established that couples--not their physicians or anyone else-- have the right to determine their own reproductive futures.” In 1985, the Yorks, then residents of New Jersey, had gone to the Norfolk clinic, one of the oldest and most famous reproductive centers on the East Coast, to get help in conceiving a child through an in vitro fertilization program.

In 1986, the couple moved to Sherman Oaks, where York practices as an internist and his wife is a graduate student in psychology.

After three unsuccessful attempts at implanting 11 eggs that had been fertilized in petri dishes, the Norfolk clinic froze a 12th embryo belonging to the Yorks.

The Yorks, however, tired of their semiannual cross-country trips and decided to have the final embryo implanted by a physician in Los Angeles at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, which the couple believe has a better success rate at impregnating women with frozen in vitro fertilized eggs than does the Virginia clinic.

For months, the Virginia clinic, however, denied the Yorks’ request to transfer the frozen embryo.

The Yorks’ lawyers argued that the couple had a right to what they considered was their “potential child.”

Time Running Out

Moreover, they said, time was running out. Risa York was 39 years old in June, and the embryo was more than two years old. No embryo frozen for more than 38 months has ever survived to mature into a delivered infant.

The couple had initially filed suit not only to get custody of their embryo but also to claim $200,000 in damages for emotional stress against the clinic. Last week, the parties reached a voluntary settlement, in which the clinic was released from any liability and the couple dropped the $200,000 claim.

According to the Yorks, they have now earned 60,000 frequent-flyer miles in their cross-country trips and spent more than $35,000 in medical fees alone.

Describing their flight as “remarkably uneventful,” the couple praised the airline for its cooperation.

“No one insisted on opening up the tank or on X-raying it,” Stephen York said.

Bought Ticket

“We bought a ticket for it,” Risa York said. “We strapped it into the seat next to me really carefully. I put a pillow in front of it so it wouldn’t jostle.

“We had a little precious cargo with us,” she said beaming.

The couple left the airport for the hospital, where the embryo will be stored until it can be implanted, which they hope will be sometime within the next two weeks.