IVF Mix-Up History

What would you do if a court said your baby wasn’t yours, and took him from your arms ?

A woman of Italian descent gave birth in New York State in 1999 o twin boys - one white and one black.

She underwent the transfer at a Manhattan fertility clinic on the same day a black couple were also undergoing IVF.

Donna Fasano gave birth to two darling boys on a cold New York day after nine months of nesting and anticipation.

In December 1998, she and her husband, Richard, were both in their 30s and had enlisted an IVF clinic to help them conceive, so when the twins cried in the hospital room, there was not only joy, but also relief.

They named the babies Vincent and Joseph and took them home to.

Donna and Richard separated their twins on May 10, 1999, when they were five months old, said a tearful goodbye to Joseph and handed him over to two strangers.

"We're giving him up because we love him," Donna explained at the time.

Although it was heartbreaking, they didn't have a choice because, despite Donna giving birth to him, Joseph had no biological relationship to Donna, Richard, or his 'twin brother' Vincent. Joseph, or Akeil as he had been renamed, was African American, while the Fasanos were white.

During a contentious court battle, the mistakes that led to this nightmare were revealed. As for Akeil's biological parents, Deborah and Robert Rogers, they attended a Manhattan IVF clinic on the same day as the Fasanos, but unlike the Fasanos, they did not become pregnant.

On Feb. 16, 2009, the Ohio, couple learned that the frozen embryo of another couple had been mistakenly transferred into wife's womb.

The lady carried the baby to term and gave birth on Sept. 24, 2009, to a boy. The couple then returned their newborn son, whom they'd held for 30 minutes, to his biological parents .

The event was emotionally devastating. After the delivery, the mother was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and the couple required long term counseling.

More than 1,600 incidents were reported between 2010 and While most were classed as “less serious,” errors ranged from incorrectly labelled pots and tubes and pipettes containing eggs that were accidentally dropped, to dishes containing the embryos of 11 patients contaminated with “cellular debris that may have contained sperm”

It was a tragic situation that had no legal precedent, the New York Court of Appeals said, as it made a ruling preventing the Fasanos from seeing the baby they had birthed and nurtured.

"It is only with the recent advent of in-vitro fertilisation technology that it has become possible to divide between two women the functions that traditionally defined a mother," the court said.

"With this technology, a troublesome legal dilemma has arisen: When one woman's fertilised eggs are implanted in another, which woman is the child's natural mother?"

It's a question society is still grappling with. Since Donna and Richard gave up baby Joseph, there have been instances of eggs being fertilised with unclean pipettes and doctors who have made mistakes but kept quiet, hoping the faulty transfers wouldn't take.

The same year as the Savage-Morell story was playing out, the IVF Wales clinic in Cardiff paid a couple ￡25,000, after one of their embryos was implanted in another woman who chose to terminate the pregnancy.

The London Telegraph?reported at the time a trainee embryologist had mixed up their embryo after taking it from the wrong shelf of the incubator.

A similar mistake occurred in Japan – in 2009 a woman sued the Kagawa Prefectural Government after the wrong embryo was implanted in her in a public hospital.

Then there was the case of single mother Susan Buchweitz of San Francisco, who faced losing her 10-month-old son after an IVF whistleblower revealed there had been a mistake when he was conceived.

Susan was approaching her late forties when she underwent fertility treatment in mid-2000. An interior decorator who had always intended to raise a family, she had attempted IVF earlier with her then fiancé, but the relationship had fallen apart under the strain of repeated, failed attempts to conceive.

In February of 2009, Shannon and Paul Morell were especially eager to bring a new life into the world. After years of infertility and miscarriages they had, in 2006, finally scrimped and saved enough to have in vitro fertilization. The result? Two?dear daughters had been born, and six precious embryos had been frozen.

They counted the days until they could transfer the six remaining embryos. Until the fateful day of February 17, 2009, when the clinic called.?“The doctor would like to you to come in today…”

Shannon writes, “Face to face with the doctor, I noticed that his face was gravely serious.?'There's been a terrible incident?in our lab,' he said. 'Your embryos have been thawed.'

A pause, as we both exchanged disbelieving looks, and he went on....

"Your embryos have been transferred into another woman.'"??

The Morells have a story to tell. A cautionary tale of medical errors, unexpected miracles, sincere mourning, and grateful bonding with their son. Amazingly, theirs is also a story of joy-filled thanksgiving . . . a story of life—life that is precious, sacred, and treasured.

Mistakes during in vitro procedures have been reported in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Poland, India, Singapore and Italy In the U.K., the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, a government watchdog, reports on adverse incidents in fertility clinics.

The lab employee labeled stored frozen embryos with the patient's birth year as 3/19/1967 instead of 3/19/ - a detail that helped the error be identified. The clinic mistakenly pulled an information sheet for another patient during the embryo transfer procedure, since embryos are stored alphabetically.

As an irony, the patient had noticed the wrong birth date when the nurse attached her wrist bracelet. She commented to the nurse, who took a pen and changed the 7 to a 9.

A data entry worker filing the paperwork noticed the conflicting birth year and realized the error. Days after the embryo was implanted, no one, not even a doctor, had checked the labels and information sheets

The chineese mother sued the clinic for alleged negligence after it confused her child's blood types with her husband's sperm. She became suspicious that something was wrong when her child's blood types were confused with her husband's. The baby's skin tone and hair color were markedly different from her husband's. Her husband is Caucasian.

In addition to the difference in complexion, the couple were told the baby has type B blood, which raised their concerns because the couple have blood types A and O.

When questioning the medical staff about this, satisfactory answers were not given initially. The couple were later informed that there was a possibility that a mix-up could have taken place. A DNA test revealed the baby is biologically related to the woman, but not to her husband.

A Canadian doctor is being sued by two of his patients who discovered their children were not genetically related to the believed donors.

Two separate legal challenges have been filed against the doctor The first is by a mother who discovered in April 2010 her five-year-old daughter was not conceived using the sperm from the donor she had selected

Testing on the sperm purchased through the clinic, purchased originally from Repromed, is alleged to demonstrate contamination of sperm from another, as yet unknown, source. The second suit was filed by a couple who received fertility treatment in March 2007.

The husband provided sperm to be artificially inseminated using a surrogate. The surrogate gave birth in late December 2007, but hospital tests identified the baby, had RH (rhesus)-positive blood while the father and surrogate were both Rh-negative. A 2008 genetic test ruled out the husband as the father.

Warsaw, Poland , February 2015 - A mother was horrified to learn ‘her’ IVF baby is not related to her after lab mix-up ? The child was very sick, so genetic testing was ordered, and the mother learned that, genetically, the child is not hers

The baby she conceived by in vitro fertilization was not her biological child when her husband’s sperm had been used to conceive the baby, but not her egg. According to the investigation findings, the error was due to a “technical mistake.” It is still unclear who is responsible for it

Dutch medical institution has launched an investigation after discovering that up to 26 women’s eggs may have been fertilized by the wrong sperm at its IVF laboratory.

A “procedural error” between mid-April 2015 and mid-November 2016 during the in-vitro fertilization was to blame according to the University Medical Centre in Utrecht. Half the women who underwent fertility treatment had become pregnant or given birth.

“For some of the 26 couples frozen embryos are still available but the chance remains that they too have been fertilized by the sperm from a man other than the intended father,” the UMC said

Three families were left devastated by a mix up at an IVF Clinic. Because identification labels were not properly checked, one patient's healthiest embryos were implanted in a second woman, whose embryos in turn went to a third woman.

The first patient received her own embryos, but they were of a poorer quality and failed to develop into a pregnancy. The three-way mistake was spotted only after the couples left the clinic.

The two women carrying the wrong embryos were called back to the clinic for an emergency procedure to flush them out and were also given drugs to prevent pregnancy. One of the women was so distressed that she has abandoned IVF treatment. The errors at St George's Hospital in Tooting, South London, follow the revelation earlier this year that a blunder at an unnamed IVF Clinic led to a white woman giving birth to black twins

Daphna Cardinale, with the support of her husband, Alexander, decided to try in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2018 with the hope of giving their daughter a sibling.

The Cardinales were successful in getting pregnant and had what they assumed was their second biological daughter in 2019.

However, the baby didn’t share many physical traits with her mom and dad. The child had a darker complexion than her parents, and noticeably darker hair than any of her immediate family members.

The couple wondered for weeks about the baby’s appearance. When their fertility clinic called to ask for a photograph of the child, they grew more perplexed.

“It seemed odd,” Alexander told People Magazine. “I thought, ‘Do they know something we don’t know?'”

In an effort to allay their worries, Daphna ordered a DNA test and the Cardinales were shocked when they got the test findings — neither parent was related to the infant.

“I was overwhelmed by feelings of fear, betrayal, anger and heartbreak,” Daphna told reporters at news conference with her husband announcing the lawsuit. “I was robbed of the ability to carry my own child. I never had the opportunity to grow and bond with her during pregnancy, to feel her kick.”

“The fertility clinic transferred to Daphna an embryo that belonged to … strangers,” their lawyer, Alex Wolf, told Today. “She was, in other words, sort of an unwilling and unknowing surrogate for another couple’s baby.”

The couple, reeling from the news, wondered what happened to their embryo.

It turns out another couple had carried the Cardinale’s embryo to term, and the two mothers gave birth a week apart in September 2019.

The couples tried to figure out what to do. In the first weeks after the mix-up was confirmed, the families would meet up almost daily. Eventually, their lawyer said, they decided to switch babies so that the children could be with their biological parents.

We hear of many mixed up cases reported around the world. We do not know whether there is a mix-up as of the process from the execution of the procedures to the live birth. However, before starting IVF procedures, there is a proven system that can minimize this risk and be controlled by the laboratory, and at the same time give confidence to IVF patients.

There is an increasing awareness of the risk of mix up among IVF patients today.

Many countries have begun to make changes to their treatment regulations as a result of the pandemic. This was partly due to IVF tourism. As the regulations of the countries change, so do the treatment profiles of their patients.

No matter how many changes are made, the word safety still means the same thing everywhere. Investing in order to ensure the minimum amount of risk to be taken in the laboratory regarding mix ups is always less costly than the situation where patients experience mix ups. In addition, the cost of an irreversible mistake is too high to consider. You must have a witness in your laboratory.

Best Regards,

Cüneyt ?etin

Resource by

• https://www.nowtolove.com.au/news/international-news/ivf-babies-swapped-at-birth-62641
• https://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/02/26/britain.twins.reut/index.html
• https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/ivf-embryo-mix-up-parenthood/593725/
• https://people.com/human-interest/inside-couples-shocking-ivf-embryo-swap-that-gave-them-another-familys-baby-what-went-wrong/

An Italian newspaper has reported that a hospital in Turin, Italy, gave two women undergoing fertility treatment the morning-after pill half an hour after artificial insemination took place, following a suspected?sperm ?mix-up. One of the couples involved noticed that the sperm sample being used had the wrong man's name on it, and alerted the clinician performing the procedure. It transpired that both women had been inseminated with the wrong man's sperm. Now, each couple will have to wait a few days to find out whether they have conceived or not.

According to the newspaper report, prosecutors in Turin are looking into the case, following claims that a secretary at the clinic had been 'helping out' on the day in question. But fertility experts have said that there is no scandal, arguing that human error is inevitable. Carlo Flamigni, president of the Italian Society for Fertility and Sterility, told the newspaper that 'when a technique has been perfected and becomes routine, you must only expect that attention levels drop. It's the risk of our daily work, not just for doctors, but for every other profession'.

The news comes only a short time after reports that another Italian couple is seeking compensation for a mistake that occurred at another fertility clinic, four years ago. A white couple undergoing fertility treatment at a clinic in Modena, Italy, gave birth to twins with dark skin following a mistake in the procedure. According to reports, the?eggs ?and sperm of two of three couples that received fertility treatment on the same day were mistakenly switched.?Genetic tests ?have already confirmed that the biological father of the twins, who were born four years ago, is a North African man, and not the twins' social father.

Annibale Volpe, director of the clinic where the mistake occurred, tried to explain how this might have happened. 'Clearly a dirty pipette which had already been used was not thrown away', she said, adding 'we used it a second time and there must have been a few sperm left behind by the previous couple'. The clinic has now opened an internal inquiry.

The reports have fueled the debate about Italy's restrictive new fertility laws. While they have been criticised, since they were passed at the end of last year, for being too strict, Italian Health Minister Girolama Sirchia said that the mistakes showed that tight regulation of fertility treatments is necessary. 'These errors show that anything can happen if you do not have rules', he said.

A similar case happened in the UK 18 months ago, when a white couple gave birth to mixed-race twins following an error at a fertility clinic in Leeds. Prior to that case, other incidents had been reported in the US and the Netherlands. That news resource by https://www.bionews.org.uk/page_89408