The fertility industry in crisis
When fertility clinics make irreparable errors, what should happen to children born in the wrong family?
This case reads like a dystopian medical drama, yet it’s unfolding in real life with real human beings at the center of it.
Tiffany Score and Steven Mills, a couple from Longwood, Florida, underwent in vitro fertilization treatment to produce three embryos using their own sperm and eggs. In March 2025, an embryo was implanted, and Score gave birth to a baby girl, named Shea, in December 2025.
However, when Shea was born, she was very obviously a different race from her parents.
Score and Mills are now suing the Fertility Center of Orlando and the lead physician, Dr. Milton McNichol, after discovering that the clinic implanted someone else's embryo. Their daughter is genetically related to neither of them. This was confirmed via genetic testing, as reported in the Guardian.
It’s unthinkable that despite having three embryos using the couple’s own sperm and eggs, the clinic carelessly implanted one that belonged to someone else. In the past, such mix-ups might have gone undetected, but modern genetic testing has made biological verification easier than ever. Genetic identity matters.
The lawsuit raises serious and urgent questions about medical negligence, about identity, about parenthood, and about the fragile ethics, security, and responsibility surrounding human embryos in fertility clinics. IVF clinics have a duty of care to accurately track embryos. Implanting the wrong embryo is an error that should never occur if proper safeguards were in place.
This case should be a call for mandatory reporting of embryo mix-ups, and for clinics to undergo independent audits rather than relying on self-reporting. Genetics carries medical history, cultural heritage, and profound implications for identity. Implanting the wrong embryo permanently alters the child’s origin story.
The birth parents have expressed that they have bonded with the child and fear the possibility that their daughter could be taken away from them. At the same time, they also suffer from emotional trauma and the possibility that their own biological child exists elsewhere. What defines parenthood in this scenario—DNA, intention, or the work of caregiving? The birth of a child should be the start of a family, not the start of a legal and emotional battle that may never come to a satisfactory resolution.
Ethical and societal fault lines
Embryo mix-up cases expose intricate problems at the heart of assisted reproduction. Embryos are simultaneously medical specimens and potential persons. They are catalogued, frozen, transported, and stored. And yet, they carry a profound moral and emotional weight—the weight of prospective parents' hopes, dreams and aspirations.
The humans who work at IVF clinics should be making sure that every step is carried out diligently and without error, because of the irreversible consequences of a mistake. Was this the first time this clinic has ever made an error like this, or has it happened before—and if so, how many times?
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the roughly 500 IVF clinics in the United States operate within a patchwork regulatory framework. Unlike organ transplantation or blood banking, fertility services are not uniformly governed by centralized oversight. Should this be changed? Perhaps embryos should be treated more like organ donations, with national registries and mandatory reporting.
Identity in the age of genetic testing: The IVF clinic faces additional lawsuits
At the time of this writing, the search for the biological parents in the Florida case continues. A judge is holding weekly hearings to resolve the mix-up and determine what happened to the couple’s own embryos. The Florida couple’s attorneys report “advancements” and “progress” in identifying the child’s genetic parents.
Meanwhile, the same clinic is facing additional pressure, with a surrogate filing a separate civil lawsuit against them for negligence and medical malpractice. This lawsuit alleges that the clinic implanted an embryo with thanatophoric dysplasia, a fatal genetic anomaly, into a surrogate without obtaining her informed consent. The baby died ten days after birth.
This case bears similarities to the Kjeld sperm donor case in Denmark, where the lack of genetic checks in the biological material “donated” multiple times by a man caused the birth of tens of babies across Europe carrying a genetic anomaly. Many died in childhood.
The Florida case should make us, as a society, reflect about trust in medicine, trust in IVF clinics, the definition of parenthood, and the ethical scaffolding of a society increasingly shaped by reproductive technology. With IVF, cryopreservation, and the use of donor gametes expanding, the infrastructure safeguarding genetic identity must keep pace.
How many other Sheas are out there, who have been denied the origin of their personal story and heritage, and have gone unnoticed?
Cases like this remind us that assisted reproduction is a profoundly human story. When the system fails, it leaves lifelong consequences in children, in families, in unknown origins of the very essence of a human being, the genetic identity. The Florida couple carried and birthed the child; they are, in every lived sense, her parents. The biological parents share her DNA; she is the result of their union. Both connections are real and meaningful. Yet the deeper question remains: Who belongs to whom?
