According to a lawsuit, a 38-year-old lady is suing the fertility clinic she used to conceive after receiving the incorrect embryo, which led to a startling discovery shortly after the baby was born.
Krystena Murray was accused in the lawsuit, which was filed in Georgia state court on Tuesday, of “unknowingly and unwillingly carrying a child through pregnancy who was not biologically related to her,” something she discovered after giving birth to the son.
According to the lawsuit, Murray’s trauma was exacerbated five months later when she was forced to relinquish custody of the child to his biological parents.
Murray, a Savannah-based wedding photographer, had made the decision to use a sperm donor through Coastal Fertility Specialists, which runs in vitro fertilization facilities in Georgia and South Carolina, in order to conceive and raise a child.
According to the lawsuit, Murray chose a sperm donor that looked like her: the donor had blue eyes, filthy blond hair, and was white.
Murray received an embryo transfer from Coastal Fertility in 2023, but the complaint claims that when she gave birth in December of that year, she “knew something was very wrong” since the kid she gave birth to was a “dark-skinned, African American baby.”
“The birth of my child was supposed to be the happiest moment of my life, and honestly, it was. But it was also the scariest moment of my life,” At a press appearance on Tuesday, Murray stated that she was immediately afraid that the baby would be taken away from her. “All of the love and joy I felt seeing him for the first time was immediately replaced by fear. How could this have happened?”
The lawsuit claims that despite taking a DNA test, Murray still bonded with the child and cherished him as her own.
Murray stated, “I hoped it was just a sperm mix-up, not an embryo mix-up.” However, the infant was not biologically connected to her, according to the DNA results.
Murray’s lawyer notified Coastal Fertility Specialists in February 2024 because she understood she had to alert the facility. The baby’s biological parents, who are not mentioned in the case, were later located and contacted by the clinic. According to the lawsuit, they petitioned for custody after proving the child’s ownership through their own DNA test.
On a painful day, Murray willingly gave the infant to his biological parents in court.
“I walked in a mom with a child and a baby who loved me and was mine and was attached to me, and I walked out of the building with an empty stroller, and they left with my son,” Murray stated.
“I grew him, I raised him, I loved him. I saw him no different than if he were mine, my own genetic embryo,” she continued.
Murray has not been able to obtain information on whether any of her own embryos were transferred to another couple or if they are still being stored at the reproductive clinic, according to her lawyer, Adam Wolf, a partner at the Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise law firm.
“We don’t know, at present, the current situation of Christina’s embryos,” Wolf stated.
Dr. Jeffrey Gray, who is the director of the embryology laboratory at Coastal Fertility Specialists, is named as a defendant in the lawsuit. Coastal Fertility Specialists apologized “deeply for the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up” in a statement on behalf of the clinic and Gray.
There were no more patients impacted by this singular incident. We quickly carried out a thorough examination and implemented extra precautions to further protect patients and make sure that such an incidence does not occur again the same day this issue was detected,” the statement said in part.
Among other things, Tuesday’s lawsuit alleges negligence against the defendants and demands damages and a jury trial.
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According to the complaint, Murray “was unintentionally used as a surrogate, against her will, for another couple.”
Mix-ups at IVF clinics are thought to be quite uncommon, but Murray’s case is not the first. A New York couple filed a lawsuit against a California IVF clinic in 2019, claiming that after giving birth to twins, the doctors there had implanted embryos belonging to two other couples.
A different California clinic was sued by two couples in 2021 after a mix-up there caused them to raise each other’s biological children for several months before switching. Afterwards, the cases were resolved.
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According to Dov Fox, a law professor at the University of San Diego, where he leads the Center for Health Law Policy and Bioethics, there is no federal regulation of IVF in the US, despite industry associations providing some recommendations on the procedure to avoid confusion. Additionally, there is no federal mandate that U.S. clinics disclose these incidents.
Additionally, no standard remedy is provided to all patients and couples impacted by such errors. Wolf, whose company handles fertility cases, called for more regulation of the IVF sector, much like other industrialized nations do.
Murray referred to her newborn son as “the most beautiful human” she had ever seen and declared that she will always think of him as her son.
