Imagine waiting anxiously to hear whether your latest round of in vitro fertilization has resulted in a pregnancy after years of failures. Then you receive a call from your doctor: you are indeed pregnant, but the wrong embryos were transferred. Now you’re an unwilling surrogate for another family.

That’s the horrible situation in which a 39-year-old Ohio woman finds herself. She chose to carry the pregnancy to term, and will relinquish the baby to its genetic parents—the likely end result if there were a legal battle.

Cases like these, while tragic, are exceedingly rare, said Dr. David Adamson, a reproductive endocrinologist and past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

“There are well in excess of 100,000 embryo transfers every year in this country,” said Adamson. “The fact that this happens once in several hundred thousand embryo transfers means the vast majority of the time, systems do protect from this taking place.”

It’s comforting that this doesn’t happen too often, but scary that it ever could.

Fertility clinic to couple: You got the wrong embryos [CNN]

(Photo: lunar caustic)

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