Parents sue IVF clinic after birthing wrong baby

A couple who discovered they were raising someone else’s child months after giving birth are suing a fertility clinic for malpractice.

Alexander and Daphna Cardinale filed the lawsuit after discovering that the California Center for Reproductive Health had “mixed up their embryo with one belonging to another set of parents”, The Independent reported. Each embryo was “mistakenly implanted” into the wrong woman during the in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment.

Daphna told People magazine that she had shrugged off her husband’s suspicions after giving birth in September 2019 to a girl who “looked really different than us”. The baby “felt so familiar to me because I carried her and I birthed her”, she said.

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Her husband remained concerned, however. “If we hadn’t done IVF, I would’ve just chalked [the lack of resemblance] up to genetics,” he said. “She just looks how she looks. No big deal. But because we’d done IVF, my brain started going to the dark place.”

Determined to “finally put an end to everyone's questions”, Daphna decided to take a home DNA test – and “finally learned the truth”, the magazine reported.

“We got an email that basically said that she was genetically related to neither of us,” Alexander recalled. “That’s when our world started falling apart.”

The Cardinales “found themselves in the agonising position of fearing they would lose their new daughter”, said The Independent, while “aware that there might be a biological child of theirs somewhere out there”.

According to the couple, the clinic contacted their attorney days later to report that their embryos had been mixed up in the lab. And a couple who had given birth to their own daughter had been tracked down.

Following further DNA tests, the two couples “decided to swap the girls”, who were then about three months old, said the BBC.

“Our memories of childbirth will always be tainted by the sick reality that our biological child was given to someone else, and the baby that I fought to bring into this world was not mine to keep,” Daphna told a news conference yesterday.

“Instead of breastfeeding my own child, I breastfed and bonded with a child I was later forced to give away,” she said, but “added that the incident has been hardest” for their other daughter, now aged seven, who had struggled to understand the swap.

The couple are seeking damages from the fertility clinic and its owner for medical malpractice, negligence and fraud.

How does IVF work?

During IVF, a woman’s eggs are fertilised by man’s sperm in a laboratory before the embryos are implanted into a woman's uterus. It is one of several techniques available to help people with fertility problems have a baby.

The treatment can be costly. According to the NHS website, one cycle of the procedure “may cost up to £5,000 or more”.

Other mix-ups are alleged to have occurred during IVF procedures. In 2019, a New York City couple sued another LA-based fertility clinic “after they unknowingly carried two other couples' boys to term”, said Insider. “The babies, thought to be twins, did not appear to be Asian like the couple, and it turned out they weren’t biologically related to them or to each other.”

The couple, who had spent years trying to conceive, “relinquished the babies to their respective biological parents”.