A woman is suing a Georgia fertility clinic after she says the facility gave her the wrong embryo during an IVF mix-up, resulting in her giving birth to someone else’s biological child. The baby has since been removed from her care and reunited with his biological parents.
Krystena Murray gave birth in December 2023, after undergoing an IVF procedure with Coastal Fertility Specialists. Murray worried there was a mix-up when she gave birth to a Black baby, though both she and her sperm donor are white. She later confirmed with an at-home DNA test that the child was not biologically hers. Despite this, she was determined to raise the little boy as her own.
Murray informed Coastal Fertility of its mistake when the boy was about three months old. The clinic then told the biological parents, who sued for custody. Murray decided to give up custody when the baby was five months old, after realizing she likely wouldn’t win a legal battle.
In a statement, Murray emphasized the heartbreak that occurred when she was forced to give up the child.
“To carry a baby, fall in love with him, deliver him, and build the uniquely special bond between mother and baby, all to have him taken away. I’ll never fully recover from this,” she said.
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She further described her anguish in a news conference, as she noted she was “turned into an unwitting surrogate, against her will, for another couple.”
“I have never felt so violated and the situation has left me emotionally and physically broken,” she told reporters. “I spent my entire life wanting to be a mom. I loved, nurtured and grew my child and I would have done literally anything to keep him.”
Coastal Fertility acknowledged the incident in a statement to CBS News.
“This was an isolated event with no further patients affected,” the statement said. “The same day this error was discovered we immediately conducted an in-depth review and put additional safeguards in place to further protect patients and to ensure that such an incident does not happen again.”
Though Coastal Fertility promises that the incident was isolated, this is not the first time that an IVF mix-up has resulted in a child being born to the wrong parents, and Live Action News has highlighted several times that such incidents have occurred.
This situation highlights one of the major issues of IVF: treating children as commodities can lead to a variety of problems, including the breakup of families, emotional distress, and attachment issues for the children who are at the center of these types of mix-ups. Though the clinic promises safeguards, this wasn’t just a simple error that can be easily fixed, as the lives of those involved are forever affected.
Meanwhile, Murray’s attorney Adam Wolf says he doesn’t know what has happened to Murray’s own embryos, highlighting yet another problem with IVF: children are created and then frozen, discarded, or, in this case, lost — and lives are forever impacted.
