Roxanne Schiebergen, a writer and actress, has become skilled at navigating New York City since she was a student at N.Y.U. Then came an unexpected pregnancy.Roxanne Schiebergen, a 30-year-old writer and actress who lives in New York, was in the bathroom of her Midtown apartment when she received a text from a close friend one day in May. The text included a screenshot of a marketing flyer promoting a “Bans Off Our Bodies” rally sponsored in part by Planned Parenthood. The photo in the ad showed four women — and the woman at the center was in a wheelchair.Ms. Schiebergen said she looked at it with disbelief. She hoisted herself from the toilet and onto her manual wheelchair. She rolled herself into the living room and sent a reply to her friend in what became a marathon texting session.The friend had sent the picture because Ms. Schiebergen had told her about her experience last July with Planned Parenthood of Greater New York: The organization had canceled Ms. Schiebergen’s appointment for an abortion at its clinic on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village after she had informed a Planned Parenthood representative that she used a wheelchair, Ms. Schiebergen said.“‘We don’t do procedures for people in a wheelchair,’” Ms. Schiebergen said the person told her.Ms. Schiebergen said she felt “defeated and powerless” when the appointment was canceled. She tried pleading her case to the employee, she said. When that didn’t work, she called her doctor’s office, where health care professionals were familiar with her medical history, and she received referrals to other clinics in Manhattan. Ms. Schiebergen said she ultimately terminated the pregnancy at a clinic on East 40th Street. Her partner at the time paid the $2,000 bill, four times what Planned Parenthood charged for the procedure, she said.“We deeply regret that Ms. Schiebergen was misinformed of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York’s ability to provide abortion care to patients in wheelchairs,” Samuel R. Mitchell Jr., the organization’s chief operating officer, said in a statement on Sunday, after initially issuing a statement saying that the organization could not comment on Ms. Schiebergen’s case because of privacy laws.At the time of Ms. Schiebergen’s experience, Mr. Mitchell said, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York used a third-party vendor to schedule appointments. “Ms. Schiebergen’s appointment was clearly mismanaged and we sincerely apologize,” he said. “Last year, PPGNY ended its contract with that specific vendor.” The organization’s facilities comply with the American with Disabilities Act, he added.Ms. Schiebergen, who grew up in the Netherlands, the daughter of a Dutch father and an American mother, said she had been trying to put her focus on her work over the last year, including writing a pilot for a potential limited series inspired by her experiences as a woman who has been partially paralyzed since she was a baby. The show is meant to capture “all the comedy and all the pain of living in a society that doesn’t see me,” she said.The abortion, which she said she does not regret, has also been on her mind. The frustration she had felt on and off toward Planned Parenthood since the canceled appointment turned to anger when she saw the ad with the woman in the wheelchair, she said.Dressed in jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt and black boots on a June afternoon at a busy Midtown cafe, Ms. Schiebergen sipped a matcha latte with oak milk. “I want my privacy, but I also feel called to do this,” she said of sharing the story of the difficulty she faced in getting an abortion a year before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.She described herself as a supporter of Planned Parenthood and said she believed its role was more crucial than ever. “It is my nightmare that people might think I am here to attack Planned Parenthood,” she said. “I am here to fight for people like me.”Going public with her story, she said, is an ironic reminder that the only way to get people to stop looking at her as a woman in a wheelchair is to draw attention to what it’s like to be a woman in a wheelchair.The AccidentIn July 1993, the Schiebergen family was driving through Pennsylvania to visit relatives. Ms. Schiebergen, 16 months old at the time, was in the car with her parents and three siblings when they were hit by another car.All four children and their parents were taken to hospitals in the region, Ms. Schiebergen and her mother said, and more than a day went by before doctors realized the severity of Roxanne’s injuries. Surgery revealed damage to her spinal cord, in the area below the T-6 vertebra. She would not have full use of her legs for the rest of her life.Read More on the End of Roe v. WadeDriving Car Pool?: A woman in Texas said that, under the state’s abortion ban, she and her fetus qualified for the car pool lane. The argument could go well beyond driving.Ancient Remedies: Some social media creators are suggesting certain herbs to induce an abortion. But experts urge caution.A Culture Warrior Goes Quiet: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida celebrated the end of Roe. But his hesitance to detail his plans for abortion policy in his state reflects the new and difficult political terrain for Republicans.The Right to Travel?: Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the Constitution did not allow states to stop women from traveling to get abortions. But what a state may choose to do if a resident travels to get an abortion is not clear.“Once I realized that, the pain was so intense, so incredibly intense,” Roxanne’s mother, Sandy Schiebergen, said in a phone interview.After six weeks in a Pennsylvania rehabilitation hospital, Roxy, as she is known, returned to the family home near Amsterdam. “My husband, Roxy’s father, and I both concentrated on ‘What can she do?’” Sandy said. “We looked at what she could do, not thinking about what she couldn’t do, because that was too painful.” She enrolled her daughter in mother-and-child swim classes and later signed her up for ski lessons. Then came tennis and horseback riding.“She fought every single day for me to have a normal life,” Roxy said of her mother.When Roxy was on a sixth-grade class trip, the students were tasked with running up a long trail on a steep hill. School officials told Roxy they would drive her to the top. “She would not have any of that,” Sandy said, adding that Roxy wheeled herself to the summit. “People were talking about it for a long time after,” her mother said. “My experience with her is that she doesn’t run away, not from something that’s important.”Ms. Schiebergen was severely injured in a car crash at 16 months old. “It’s a difficult existence, to have a different view of yourself than the world has of you,” she said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesShe learned to walk with leg braces and a walker, spending several hours a day standing upright, which was important for bone growth. But she preferred her manual wheelchair. “I want to be able to go fast,” she told her mother.As a side effect of the injuries, Ms. Schiebergen developed scoliosis. She underwent three surgeries as a teenager to have metal rods inserted along her spine. She spent three months in a body cast.As a tween, she developed a love of singing and performing. She joined her middle school’s production of the musical “Hair.” For her solo rendition of “White Boys/Black Boys,” the teacher overseeing the production had Ms. Schiebergen wear a costume out of keeping with the hippie-era setting: a large dress that draped over Roxy and covered her wheelchair.“They had shame that I was in a wheelchair,” she said. “It’s a difficult existence, to have a different view of yourself than the world has of you.”In 2010, she went to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts to study musical theater. Learning to navigate crowded sidewalks and broken subway elevators was a challenge, but she said she loved New York life.After her graduation, in 2014, she remained in the city, auditioning for plays, doing voice-over work and modeling. She traveled through Europe and South America with her close friend, Madeline Rhodes, a performer known as MuMu. Ms. Schiebergen returned to the Netherlands in 2018, when the metal rods in her back snapped. She underwent surgery and a long rehabilitation process.The CancellationMs. Schiebergen has spent most of the pandemic in New York. By spring 2021, she had started a relationship with a man. A month or so into it, she learned she was pregnant. “I was freaking out,” she said. “I kept on taking tests.”She told few people about the pregnancy, besides Ms. Rhodes and her boyfriend at the time. Within days, she decided on an abortion. “I was in a brand-new relationship,” she said. “Having a family was something I wanted to do with someone I loved, and I didn’t know him.”Ms. Schiebergen said she called Planned Parenthood of Greater New York on July 22 and spent about 45 minutes on the phone with an employee. “I was crying from the start,” she said. The employee asked if she had any pre-existing conditions, she recalled. “I told her I had a spinal cord injury and rods in my back from scoliosis,” Ms. Schiebergen said.She did not say she used a wheelchair during the call, she added. “When people hear the word ‘wheelchair,’” she said, “they make decisions for me about what I can and cannot do without having any understanding of what I do for myself every single day.”The Planned Parenthood representative scheduled an appointment, quoting a price of $500, she said. Later that day, Ms. Schiebergen was taking her dog for a walk when someone at the organization called to confirm. “By the way,” Ms. Schiebergen said she told the caller, “I’m in a wheelchair. Just making sure you guys have an elevator.”A Planned Parenthood representative then canceled the appointment, saying the organization did not provide abortions to women in wheelchairs, Ms. Schiebergen said.“I felt like this can’t be real,” she said. “I started bargaining. I said something along the lines of, ‘I can get on a table by myself. I’m very independent.’ This was through tears.”A Planned Parenthood office in Lower Manhattan.Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesPeople who work on behalf of those with disabilities said they were not surprised by Ms. Schiebergen’s case. “This happens all the time, unfortunately,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. She said there were not statistics available on the number of women with disabilities who encounter difficulties in getting access to abortions, in part because of the shame that surrounds the procedure.“We know there are significant issues in terms of accessibility for disabled patients of any medical clinic, and certainly abortion clinics and reproductive health clinics are included in that,” said Ms. Ives-Rublee, an author of the recent report “Reproductive Justice for Disabled Women: Ending Systemic Discrimination.”A few weeks after her abortion, Ms. Schiebergen and Ms. Rhodes went to lunch with a friend who was a disability lawyer. The lawyer had a connection to Planned Parenthood and notified someone there about Ms. Schiebergen’s experience. On Aug. 13, Ms. Schiebergen received an email, which she shared with The New York Times.“Hi Roxy,” a senior member of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York’s clinical staff wrote. “I am reaching out to connect with you regarding your experience while attempting to schedule an appointment last month. I am hopeful that you may be open to speaking with me and cannot express how sorry we are for the experience that you had.” (The staff member declined to comment for this article.)Nine months later, in May, Ms. Schiebergen’s friend texted her the ad showing a woman in a wheelchair and the words “Planned Parenthood.” Ms. Schiebergen said that, when she saw it, “I felt genuinely confused, like maybe I had said or done something wrong.”She decided to see if her experience was a fluke. She phoned the clinic again, this time recording the call. She told the person who answered that she was pregnant (although she was not) and wanted an abortion. “I have a spinal cord injury and I’m in a wheelchair,” Ms. Schiebergen said. “I can’t walk. I just want to make sure that that’s not an issue.” In the 22-minute call, the employee told Ms. Schiebergen that the organization could not provide an abortion for her because of her use of a wheelchair and her inability to stand on her own.Later, a Planned Parenthood representative who had been apprised of the phone conversation, called Ms. Schiebergen to ask her more questions, including about her upper-body mobility. In a third conversation, the person told Ms. Schiebergen that Planned Parenthood could, in fact, give her an appointment for an abortion. (Ms. Schiebergen shared the recordings of the calls with The Times.)“Ultimately,” Ms. Schiebergen said, “when someone who has a disability calls Planned Parenthood to schedule an abortion — which is already a frightening and chaotic experience — they should be welcomed and asked how Planned Parenthood can assist them in a way that is safe, without being told ‘no, no, no’ multiple times.”The ProtestThe day after our interview in the cafe, the Supreme Court published its decision to eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion. Ms. Schiebergen texted me to say she was going to an abortion rights rally in Washington Square Park.We met on her Midtown block. She was wearing jeans, aviator sunglasses and a T-shirt. I hailed a taxi. As Ms. Schiebergen rolled herself toward it, the driver pulled away. I hailed a second cab. When the driver saw Ms. Schiebergen wheeling toward him, he said, “I have to go pick someone else up.” Because of traffic, he wasn’t able to speed off like the previous driver. “This is every day,” she said.The third taxi driver who pulled over claimed her wheelchair wouldn’t fit in the trunk. “It will,” Ms. Schiebergen said. She put one hand on the car’s back seat, another hand on the top of the window frame and lifted herself into the car. She then slid a hand behind one of her calves and brought one leg into the cab, then the other. I took the wheelchair into the back, where it fit easily. The process took less time than it takes to get a baby and stroller into a taxi.A Brooklyn Bridge protest march for abortion rights in May, after the leak of a draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.Anna Watts for The New York TimesThe everyday discrimination faced by Ms. Schiebergen is all too common, said Robert Fuller, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Virginia. “In doctor’s offices, in taxis, in shopping malls and restaurants, this is what happens to people with paralysis every single day,” said Dr. Fuller, who specializes in high-risk maternal care, often for paralyzed women.Statistics on abortions for women with disabilities are hard to come by, Dr. Fuller added. “But what happened to Roxy is probably more common than people realize,” he said. Women with paralysis, he continued, “are excluded from conversations about reproductive care because there is an assumption, ‘Oh, they could never do that.’ In fact, paralysis does not affect fertility in women.”There is no medical reason to deny an abortion to a woman who is paralyzed just because she is paralyzed, Dr. Fuller said. But there are questions that should be answered to determine if she can safely have an abortion at a clinic, as Ms. Schiebergen did, or if she should undergo the procedure at a hospital. Those questions, he said, include: Does your mobility affect your physical ability to receive pelvic exams? Are you able to medically tolerate gynecologic exams or procedures? How high is your spinal cord injury?He added that abortion providers should ask women who use wheelchairs if they suffer from autonomic dysreflexia, a condition that afflicts some people with spinal cord injuries. If a paralyzed woman has the condition, that does not automatically mean she should have procedures only in a hospital setting, Dr. Fuller said, but a doctor familiar with her health history should be consulted.Near Washington Square Park, Ms. Schiebergen and I got out of the taxi as the rally was already underway. She wanted to take hold of an edge of a large banner that the crowd was carrying up Fifth Avenue, but she couldn’t. “I need both hands to march,” she said, rolling herself forward.The visit brought Ms. Schiebergen close to her N.Y.U. haunts, and also near the Bleecker Street clinic. She said she hoped it would welcome her and other paralyzed women who would need its services in the future.“Because if you can’t get an abortion in Greenwich Village, New York,” she said, “where can you?”

When the first letter from Women & Infants Hospital arrived in the mail in July 2017, Elaine Meyer thought perhaps it was a fund-raising solicitation or clerical error. The letter, which included a billing invoice, addressed her as “Dear Patient,” but she had not been a patient at the hospital for nearly two decades. That’s when she and her husband, Barry Prizant, had completed their infertility treatment there.After three miscarriages, they had gone through several rounds of IVF at Women & Infants in Providence, R.I., near their home in Cranston, resulting in the creation of at least 18 test-tube embryos. One of those had become their son, Noah, born in December of 1996, and along with joy there had been a lot of mourning and reckoning with the reality that this would be the sole realization of their efforts.Dr. Meyer mentioned the letter to her husband and stashed it in a filing cabinet of her home office.But then another came the next month. “If you would like WIH to continue to store your embryos/oocytes,” the letter said, “please return a copy of this letter, signed and notarized, along with a check in the amount of $500.”Dr. Meyer, a longtime psychologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, read it with confusion and a growing sense of alarm. Without the payment, the hospital would consider embryos “legally abandoned” and may discard them.“I thought, ‘This can’t be right,’” she said. “We know we went back for all of our embryos.”Those frozen embryos, still in the hospital’s possession, are now at the center of a lawsuit that Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant have filed in Rhode Island’s Superior Court, alleging breach of contract, negligence, bailment and intentional infliction of emotional distress — all of which Women & Infants denies in its response. In a statement, a spokeswoman there declined to comment on the case, citing patient confidentiality and federal privacy laws. “We were always coming back for our embryos”: Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant.Maddie Malhotra for The New York TimesWhen the letters arrived, Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant, a speech and language pathologist and visiting scholar at Brown University, were then fulfilled empty nesters. Noah was in college, a successful student and happy young man that Dr. Meyer, now 63, calls “the light of our lives.”She was ensconced in her work educating students and health care professionals how to have difficult conversations with patients, upholding what she calls an “emotional standard of care.”Dr. Prizant, 69, who specializes in children and adults on the autism spectrum, was training other practitioners and churning out papers and podcasts. He is the author of “Uniquely Human,” a book written with Tom Fields-Meyer. He plays drums in a band and is proud of his roots in the stickball streets of Brooklyn. “Basically, I don’t like to take crap,” he said.He and his wife, a former 4H club member raised in a large working-class family in small-town Connecticut, met in 1985 while attending a conference at a psychiatric hospital. Married two years later, they wanted children but felt it was important for her to finish graduate school first. Dr. Meyer got pregnant at 34, then had a miscarriage. Two more miscarriages followed.The couple first sought treatment from Dr. Gary Frishman at Women & Infants, which is affiliated with Brown’s medical school, in 1995. Dr. Prizant gave his wife daily shots before her eggs were harvested at the clinic and mixed in a petri dish with his sperm to create embryos, some of which were then implanted in Dr. Meyer’s uterus. The first two cycles didn’t work.“It takes something that is supposed to be so private and so intimate and so tender and makes it a whole different affair,” Dr. Meyer said, recalling the experience. “You’re vulnerable and you’re completely dependent on other people. There are so many injections and appointments and disappointments, you put your trust in what the doctors tell you because you are desperate for the process to work.”During a third cycle, Dr. Meyer became pregnant with Noah. After his birth, she and her husband were optimistic they could have another child. There were nine embryos left over from the three cycles, and they signed agreements with the hospital to “cryopreserve” them for implantation in the future.A card made by the couple’s son, Noah.Maddie Malhotra for The New York TimesDr. Meyer felt an acute attachment to the embryos, calling each “a spark of life.” She would drive out of her way to pass by the hospital, stopping in the parking lot to sing lullabies to them while in her car. “We were always coming back for our embryos,” she said. “That was always the plan.”After Noah started preschool, the couple began anew at Women & Infants in August of 2000 with shots and doctor appointments. The hospital would thaw the nine embryos, and those that survived this process would be implanted in Dr. Meyer’s uterus, in the hopes that at least one would develop into a pregnancy.The couple said they were told all the embryos were thawed; they believe three survived the thaw and were implanted. But weeks later, they were called in for “the failure conversation” — what Dr. Meyer called the meetings with doctors to discuss an unsuccessful procedure and possible next steps.This one was with Dr. David Keefe, then the director of the hospital’s division of reproductive medicine. He advised Dr. Meyer that at 43, her and her husband’s most reasonable path to additional children was donor eggs or adoption.Dr. Prizant was done, emotionally exhausted. “It sets you in a constant state of grief,” he said of infertility treatment.Dr. Meyer, a devoted Quaker, needed a little more time and spiritual consultation, but also made peace, grateful for Noah. “We both decided,” Dr. Prizant said, “to look at having just one child as an opportunity to have more resources to serve many more children through our work.”A Crack in the GlassReading the second letter, which like the first one asked for $500, filled Dr. Meyer with dread. She left a voice mail message at the hospital. Days later, she spoke to a person who turned out to be a clerk in the billing department.“I am telling you, there are no embryos,” Dr. Meyer said, asking her to contact the lab itself.For weeks, she waited for a call back. Nothing. She called the clerk again. “I’ve confirmed with the lab, there are two frozen embryos,” the clerk said.Ms. Meyer was stunned, silent. Then she spoke. “Do you understand how serious this is?” she said.A few days later, she was driving back from the family cottage in South Kingstown, when Dr. Ruben Alvero, then the director of the fertility center at Women & Infants, called to confirm. “We have two of your embryos,” he said.She pulled her car to the side of the road.The embryos, Dr. Alvero said, had been found in a glass vial at the bottom of the tank. The vial has a crack in it, he told her, which meant that the embryos had been exposed, possibly for a decade, to the nitrogen cooling agent. They most likely are not viable, he told her, and apologized.Dr. Meyer told Dr. Alvero this was too much to take in from the side of the road. A meeting was arranged for December of that year, between Dr. Meyer, her husband, Dr. Alvero and Richard Hackett, who helped to create and manages the I.V.F. lab at Women & Infants. Dr. Frishman, who had been Dr. Meyer’s main doctor and is still on the staff at Women & Infants, did not attend.The four gathered in a conference room, with Dr. Prizant and his wife on one side, Dr. Alvero and Mr. Hackett on the other.According to the legal complaint, the men representing the hospital apologized for the circumstances that had brought them together and explained to the couple again what had happened. Two of Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant’s embryos had disappeared sometime before Dr. Meyer’s procedure in 2000, Dr. Meyer said they told her and her husband. The embryos were located in 2010 when the tank was emptied for cleaning or maintenance and re-entered into the inventory. The vial, as Dr. Alvero had told Dr. Meyer earlier in the fall, had been damaged. When the clinic implemented a new storage fee policy in 2017, the couple received the bills.She asked if the cells of the embryo still physically existed. They did, the men told her. Though likely compromised, the embryos are still intact, in their glass vial with her name on it.Dr. Meyer holds the lid of a petri dish containing embryos that were implanted in her in 2000.Maddie Malhotra for The New York Times“Those are ours!” Dr. Meyer blurted out, and said that she didn’t want the embryos discarded. Dr. Alvero told her that the hospital would continue to store them and that he would waive the $500 fee. He and Mr. Hackett apologized and flipped through pages in her huge medical file, which the men had brought to the meeting. Mr. Hackett stopped on one page, she said, and began tapping his fingers on it: a handwritten note that said “2 missing.”“You knew they were missing” and didn’t tell us, Dr. Meyer asked?No one ever tried to find the embryos, or thought to alert us when they were found years later, Dr. Prizant asked?Perhaps the couple forgot that they had been told that the embryos were missing, they said Dr. Alvero suggested.Dr. Prizant and Dr. Meyer were sure no one had ever told them anything was missing. Why would they have discussed adoption and egg donation if they had known two embryos were lost in the hospital? “That would have set us on a different course of action,” he said.Dr. Keefe, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and a fertility specialist at New York University Langone Fertility Center, remembered his patients, and expressed surprise to learn of the two long-lost embryos. “Yikes,” he said. “I feel so terribly for this couple.”Dr. Keefe said that he would have only known if embryos were missing if someone from the lab had notified him, and in this case they had not. In the rare instances when embryos are lost or misplaced, he added, the protocol is to notify the patient immediately, apologize and explain in detail what might have happened. “Transparency is the foundation of trust and the essential element of the doctor-patient relationship,” he said.“These are not two cans of peaches on the shelf at a Stop & Shop,” he went on, speaking of the embryos. “They are much more like two kids on a playground. When you’re responsible for them and they’re lost, you notify the people who care about them the most and tell them all you can.”Dr. Meyer, who has devoted a career to speaking up for patients and more recently to studying and writing about bioethics, scoffs at the idea that she would have quietly accepted the news in 2000 that her embryos had been lost. “There is no way on God’s green earth,” she said.Dr. Alvero, now the director of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University and the president of the Society for Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility, referred questions to the public relations department of Women & Infants. The hospital’s spokeswoman said Dr. Frishman and Mr. Hackett were not available for comment.‘My Line in the Sand’At the meeting in December 2017, Dr. Prizant and Dr. Meyer said, Dr. Alvero asked what might help them feel resolved about the situation.The couple said they wanted to find something meaningful to come from the careless treatment of their embryos. Perhaps it could provide a learning opportunity, they suggested — proposing, among other ideas, that Dr. Meyer could help train fertility staff at the hospital to interact more compassionately with and informatively to patients in the thicket of family planning.Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant on their wedding day.Maddie Malhotra for The New York TimesDr. Alvero and Mr. Hackett said they would consult with the hospital administration and get back in touch after the holidays. But by May 2018, after five months of silence, Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant wrote a letter to Dr. Alvero, copying the hospital’s interim president and chief executive, the Rhode Island attorney general and the head of the state’s department of health.“As parents who cherished children, we would NOT have forgotten that our embryos were missing,” they wrote. “We would not have rested until they were found and cared for.”Soon after mailing the letter, they got a phone call from Katherine Wills, the hospital’s director of risk management. “‘This happened a long time ago,’” Dr. Meyer recalled Ms. Wills telling her. Ms. Meyer felt the message was, “Get over it.”Dr. Meyer explained to Ms. Wills that embryos discovered in the bottom of the tank represented to her and her husband potential human beings: children, her and her husband’s children. “I was horrified,” Dr. Meyer said.That conversation, she said, “was my line in the sand.” Hesitant at first, Dr. Meyer and her husband decided to take legal action. “As a woman who had suffered miscarriages and infertility, all the powerful feelings of sadness, shame and grief came crashing back and the knot in my stomach was real.”They are seeking a jury trial and punitive, compensatory, consequential damages. But Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant said the real point of the lawsuit is to compel the hospital, and perhaps other infertility treatment providers, to commit to reliable and accountable storage management and patient care practices. (They want to urge vigilance on the increasing number of people freezing eggs and embryos.)In a legal filing, the hospital alleged that Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant “were guilty of comparative negligence” but provided no further detail. Angela L. Carr, the hospital’s lawyer, declined to comment.The couple at their cottage in South Kingstown.Maddie Malhotra for The New York Times“I would not be true to myself if I let this be swept under the rug,” Dr. Meyer said. “It is our job as parents to give our children, and in this case embryos, every opportunity for life and for dignity. We were denied our right to fulfill our role as parents.”‘You Assume There is Oversight’Dr. Prizant and Dr. Meyer’s saga is “an interesting story not because it’s unique but because it’s probably not unique,” said Jeffrey Kahn, the director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. (He does not know the couple and is not involved in their case.) “There is so little regulation and no accounting of how many embryos there are in storage,” he said.The fertility industry is a lucrative business but operates largely unchecked by regulators, Dr. Kahn said, for several reasons, including federal policies in place since the mid-1980s. The policies bars federal dollars from being used for research that involves the harm or destruction of human embryos.Federal regulation tends to follow federal funding, often leaving privately funded I.V.F. facilities without oversight. Also, most of what takes place in an I.V.F. laboratory falls outside the purview of the Food and Drug Administration. “You assume there is oversight, as there is with most doctors and procedures, but when it comes to infertility, that turns out not to be true,” he said.A study published in 2020 in the journal Fertility & Sterility found that 133 lawsuits were filed in the previous decade over lost, discarded or damaged frozen embryos. That number reflects lawsuits filed, which is likely a fraction of actual occurrences, said Dov Fox, the director of the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics at University of San Diego and one of the study’s authors. Dr. Fox also noted that most of these types of suits settled out of court, with undisclosed terms and nondisclosure agreements, making it difficult to know the outcomes.Three lawsuits have been filed against Women & Infants Hospital related to lost embryos, including two in the mid-1990s, when Ms. Meyer was a patient. In 2019, a woman named Marisa Cloutier-Bristol described receiving in 2017 a bill from Women & Infants similar to the ones that Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant received, which notified Ms. Cloutier-Bristol that the hospital had a frozen embryo belonging to her and her late husband, despite having been told in 2003 that her I.V.F. cycle had not produced any viable embryos.“I felt like I was now grieving a child I didn’t even know existed, a child I could have had,” she told “Good Morning America” in 2019. She sued the hospital. (The case has since been dismissed. Through her lawyer, Ms. Cloutier-Bristol declined to comment.)As Dr. Meyer and Dr. Prizant’s case winds its way through the pandemic-delayed civil courts system, the couple is also thinking about what to do with their embryos.After seeking spiritual support and guidance at their temple and their Quaker meeting, the couple is leaning toward repossessing their embryos, and burying them in the backyard in Cranston, where her mother’s ashes, and the remains of the family dog, are buried. They also have talked to a rabbi about a cemetery burial.“We need to allow our embryos to finally have some peace and rest,” Dr. Meyer said. “And we need to find some peace and rest ourselves.”