A Georgia woman who gave birth to a baby that was not biologically hers is suing a fertility clinic for negligence.
When Krystena Murray gave birth to a baby boy, in December 2023, she knew something was wrong. Murray, a white woman, had a white sperm donor. But the baby she birthed was black. Still, Murray nursed and raised him for about four months, until the boy’s biological parents sued for custody. The boy’s embryo had been planted mistakenly in Murray’s womb.
“The actions of the fertility clinic have come very close to destroying me, have left irreparable damage to my soul, and ultimately left me questioning whether I should be a mom or not,” Murray said to media this week.
Coastal Fertility Specialists called the event an “unprecedented error” and said in a statement that it “deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up.”
Such a mix-up isn’t unprecedented. Years ago in Southern California, a Los Angeles fertility clinic implanted the wrong embryos in two different women; the two couples raised each other’s children for months. One of the mothers said she was “robbed of the ability to carry [her] own child.” Both children had spent months being breastfed by women who were not their mothers and raised by fathers and siblings who were not their genetic family members. Both mothers bonded to babies that were not genetically theirs, and they experienced emotional hell.
In 2019, a New York couple sued a fertility clinic after a woman gave birth to twins who were not her biological children. In 2023, a Las Vegas man and his 18-year-old daughter sued a clinic after a DNA test proved that the two were not biologically related. In 2019, a Utah mother discovered that her twelve-year-old son was not her husband’s biological son and that another man’s sperm, unbeknownst to her, had been used to fertilize her egg.
Embryo mix-ups result in custody disputes and emotional trauma. Fewer than 1 percent of embryo implants are botched by mix-ups, but that’s still 1 percent too many. This also doesn’t account for mix-ups that are still unknown. In some cases, it’s easy to tell when a child is not genetically related to a parent. In others, as was the case with the Las Vegas father–daughter pair and the Utah couple, it might take something as random as a genealogy test to inform parents that their children are not biologically related to them.
Donald Trump announced his plans this week to expand access to in vitro fertilization treatments. Trump will protect IVF access and “aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments,” his executive order said. The order does not, however, mention any new potential guardrails that could ensure fewer slipups in the IVF process or mitigate the overproduction of embryos — millions of embryos are either frozen, discarded, or donated to research annually.