A woman from the United States of America, who unknowingly carried and gave birth to a baby boy who was not biologically hers, has filed a lawsuit against the clinic that wrongly performed the in vitro fertilization (IVF), after she was forced to give up custody of the baby, "BBC" reported.
Krystena Murray, from Georgia, became pregnant after IVF treatment at Coastal Fertility Clinic in May 2023.
But it became clear that the embryo she was carrying actually belonged to another couple, after Murray gave birth to a baby who was of a different ethnicity than her and the sperm donor she had chosen.
Despite the mistake, she wanted to keep the child and cared for him for several months until the biological parents gained custody.
"To carry a baby, to fall in love with it, to give birth to it, and to build a unique bond between mother and baby, all of that and then have it taken away from me, I will never fully recover from that," she said.
Murray, a white woman, gave birth to an African-American baby girl on December 2023, XNUMX. She has never posted photos of the child online and has not allowed her friends and family to see it.
According to the lawsuit filed against the clinic, she purchased a DNA kit that does at-home testing, and the results in January 2024 confirmed that they were not biologically related.
She informed the clinic about the mix-up the following month. This alarmed the biological parents, who sued to gain custody when the baby was three months old.
Murray voluntarily gave up custody after her legal team told her she had no chance of winning the case. The baby now lives with her biological parents in another state under a different name.
According to the lawsuit, Murray still does not know whether the clinic mistakenly transferred her embryo to another couple, or what might have happened next.
The clinic, Coastal Fertility, has acknowledged the error and apologized for the inconvenience caused.
"This was an isolated event with only patients affected. The same day the error was discovered, we immediately began a thorough review and put in place additional safety procedures to protect patients and ensure that such incidents do not occur again," the clinic announced.
In recent years, many lawsuits have been filed against fertility clinics in the US over errors with IVF.
IVF is a procedure during which a woman's ovaries are fertilized with a man's sperm in a laboratory before the embryo is placed in the woman's uterus.
