Restore Hope for Nashville CRH Patients

We are the abandoned patients and victims of Nashville’s Center for Reproductive Health (CRH). On April 6, 2024, Dr. Jaime Vasquez (CRH’s Medical Director, owner, and sole staff-physician) abruptly closed the fertility clinic without notifying its patients - some of whom were in the middle of intensive IVF cycles and fertility treatments. Patients showed up for appointments to an empty office. Others called with questions left unanswered about their medications, cycle timing, and whether or not they’d be able to advance with their plans to start their families. All of us were left wondering where to place our hope for the future.

The state of Tennessee officially intervened and shuttered the clinic on April 26th after weeks of duress forced patients to file complaints with the Department of Health. Since the state’s takeover in late April, report upon report of troubling information about the clinic’s condition have come out. One of the most shocking discoveries for patients has been learning that a man the clinic portrayed as a doctor was not a licensed doctor at all. Each discovery feels like a new violation of the sacred, and apparently misplaced, trust we had in the clinic and Dr. Vasquez’s care to aid in the pursuit of growing our families.

It’s been 4 months now since the state-appointed receiver took over the facility and, with it, all of our genetic material, patient records, and suspended hope. We continue to await any information about the state of our embryos and other genetic material - a process we are told will take another few weeks, but in reality will require starting over at new clinics, reacquainting them with our individual circumstances, and testing (either by trial-and-error or by sophisticated and expensive chromosomal labs) that everything is still viable in spite of all that it’s gone through. It will be many months more before any of our genetic material is transferred, and perhaps years before we understand how and why this has all transpired.

Throughout this process, the state has been acting on behalf of the patients in a consumer protection capacity to try and recoup monies paid to the clinic without services rendered. They are not able to represent the collective toll of our personal experiences, nor subsidize the cost of starting over at new clinics. We know from the receiver that the clinic is bankrupt and that Dr. Vasquez’s medical malpractice insurance was not renewed from September 2023 forward.

As a group, we are financially and emotionally tapped from the stress and demanding nature of fertility care. We shouldn’t have to be dealing with any of this. To learn that the doctor we trusted actually took advantage of our desperation is an incomprehensible violation that compounds the biological cruelty of infertility. Any money raised by this effort will be utilized by CRH patients to assist in their renewed fertility pursuits. We are grateful for your support!