IVF mixup leads to wrong woman giving birth to California couple's baby

Justin Chan

A California fertility clinic is under fire after it mistakenly implanted a couple's embryo into a stranger who lives on the other side of the country, according to CBS News.

CHA Fertility Center, which is based in Los Angeles, reportedly implanted Anni and Ashot Manukyan's embryo, along with the embryo of another couple, into a woman who lives in New York. The two babies were born on March 31 to an Asian couple, who first thought they had twins but soon questioned whether the newborns were even theirs.

"They knew the day the babies were born because they had apparently called CHA and told them, 'OK, we're Asian and these children are white, they're Caucasian. These children are definitely not ours,'" Anni said.

Several days later, the clinic purportedly contacted the Manukyans and asked them to take a DNA test. The couple complied and learned the next day that they were indeed the parents of one of the babies.

"She said, 'Think of it as a good thing. You have a son now.' And I just lashed out," Anni said. "What about the woman, you know? What is she going through right now? Thank God we got our child back but she ended up with nothing."

Anni and her husband, however, ran into roadblocks while trying to get their baby back. The two allegedly had to wait a month and go through a legal battle before they were finally granted custody of their son, Alec.

"It was hard not knowing where your child is," she recalled. "We just cried all day because we didn't know if we ever were going to see him."

Equally heartbreaking was the fact that Anni never got to experience pregnancy, she said.

"I didn't get to hold him," Anni told CBS. "I didn't get to have him inside of me. I didn't get to feel him kick."

The Manukyans' lawyer, Adam Wolf, along with the New York couple, have since filed separate lawsuits against the clinic.

"I can't see how they could ever trust CHA again," Wolf said. "I can't see how anybody can trust CHA again. This is just a failure of epic proportions."

The clinic did not respond to CBS's request for comment.