Baby Mix Up

[CrimsonTide4]

Black IVF Babies Born to White Couple

July 8
— By Georgina Prodhan

LONDON (Reuters) - An historic legal battle was brewing in Britain as a newspaper reported on Monday that a white couple had had black twins as the result of a mistake during fertility treatment.

The couple will be at the center of a court case this autumn to decide who should be considered the babies' real parents, in the first reported case of its kind in Britain.

The mix-up involves a black couple also trying for a test-tube baby at the same time, The Sun newspaper reported, quoting a source at the authority which runs the fertility clinic involved.

No confirmation was available from health officials, who instead swiftly circulated a gagging order imposed on them by the High Court.

The injunction also forbade naming the two sets of parents involved or the clinic.

Experts say a mistake could have occurred in one of three ways in the IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) process, which involves fertilizing an egg with sperm before implanting the resulting embryo -- often two or three at a time -- in the woman's womb.

The wrong sperm could have been used to fertilize the right egg, the right sperm could have been used to fertilize the wrong egg, or the embryo implanted in the woman may have been another couple's altogether.

WORST NIGHTMARE

"It's our worst nightmare," said Sonya Jerkovic, in charge of the London Fertility Center's laboratory. "It's something we think about all the time."

She admitted mistakes could happen, despite checks at her clinic including color-coding of samples and having two technicians present at every stage in the process.

"Embryos all look the same," she added.

Although experts insist such mistakes are extremely rare, the case will do little to reassure the tens of thousands of British would-be parents who go through IVF treatment each year.

"It's always there at the back of your mind -- what if they're not mine? What if they've put them on the wrong shelf" said Doriver Lilley, 37, who gave birth to IVF twins after six years of trying to conceive.

"It's just awful that somebody's mistake has made a mess of a lot of lives," she told Reuters. "This has been noticed because the babies were black. What if it had been two white couples?"

Worldwide, there have been only two recorded cases of mistakes in which a mother gave birth to babies of an unexpected race after fertility treatment. In 1999, a black baby was born to a white couple because of an embryo mix-up at a fertility clinic in New York. The couple was ordered to return the boy to the biological parents.

But in Holland a woman who gave birth to twins with different fathers in 1997 after receiving IVF treatment was allowed to keep them. The darker skin tone of Wilma Stuart's son, Koen, led to tests that proved that her husband was not the father; his sperm sample had been contaminated.


http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Living/re...20708_187.html