She Gave Birth After IVF, Then Had to Give Up Baby

A Georgia woman who gave birth a little over a year ago to a long-hoped-for baby had to give him up just months later—because the fertility clinic that had helped her get pregnant implanted another couple's embryo. That's per a new civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in state court by 38-year-old Krystena Murray, who alleges in her complaint that she in effect became an "unwitting surrogate, against her will" for that couple, per the AP.

The Savannah wedding photographer underwent in vitro fertilization at a local clinic run by Coastal Fertility Specialists, which transferred an embryo to Murray in 2023. She gave birth in December of that year, but Murray says in her suit that she instantly knew something was amiss: Her sperm donor had been logged as having dirty blond hair and blue eyes, resembling herself, but the baby she gave birth to was a "dark-skinned" Black baby, per NBC News. "All of the love and joy I felt seeing him for the first time was immediately replaced by fear," she said at a Tuesday presser. "How could this have happened?"

To make things even worse, Murray soon found out via a DNA test that it wasn't just a sperm donor snafu—she wasn't the biological mother of her new baby, either. She informed the clinic, which in turn informed the baby's biological parents, who in turn got a DNA test of their own for confirmation, then sued Murray for custody. She had to turn the baby over five months after giving birth. "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," she tells NBC after the handover in court.

story continues below

Murray's attorney, Adam Wolf, says they don't know if any of Murray's embryos were accidentally implanted in someone else. A statement from Coastal Fertility Specialists addressing Murray's negligence suit, which seeks damages and a jury trial, notes that it "deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up." The clinic calls it an "isolated event with no further patients affected," per NBC, which adds there's no federal regulation of IVF in the US. Murray, meanwhile, says she'll always consider that baby her son. "I'll never fully recover from this," she says, per CBS News. (More IVF stories.)