The reproductive industry’s latest scandal involves a fertility company that 'transferred' the wrong embryo, later leading to a Queensland couple giving birth to a stranger’s child.
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(LifeSiteNews) -- The biological parents of a child born to the wrong parents after an “IVF mix-up” in Queensland, Australia, have discovered that they have no legal right to their child.
The reproductive industry’s latest scandal began when the fertility company Monash IVF accidentally “transferred” the wrong embryo and a Queensland couple discovered that they “had given birth to a stranger’s child.” Monash IVF discovered the mistake in February when the parents asked to transfer their remaining frozen embryos to a different “provider.”
According to one press report:
Monash IVF immediately launched an investigation which found strict laboratory safety measures to safeguard the embryos were followed. "Instead of finding the expected number of embryos, an additional embryo remained in storage for the birth parents," a Monash IVF spokesperson said. “The investigation confirmed that an embryo from a different patient had previously been incorrectly thawed and transferred to the birth parents, which resulted in the birth of a child.”
The fertility clinic apologized to the family, stating that the mistake was a result of “human error.”
“On behalf of Monash IVF, I want to say how truly sorry I am for what has happened,” Monash chief executive Michael Knaap stated. “All of us at Monash IVF are devastated and we apologise to everyone involved. We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time. Since becoming aware of this incident, we have undertaken additional audits and we're confident that this is an isolated incident.”
Meanwhile, however, family law experts told the press that Australian law recognizes birth parents rather than biological parents as the legal parents of the child. As 9News noted, the “law is there to protect birth parents from any potential legal issues with egg or sperm donors during the IVF process, but it also applies in this situation.” The law also means that Monash may face no legal ramifications for making its mistake.
“I don't think anyone can believe that in this modern age that this bungle could happen," former Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told Weekend Today. “I can say from personal experience, I've been through IVF and I was unsuccessful ... so I know how important it is to have a baby at the end of it. I think, you know, we need to not lose sight of the fact that there is a beautiful baby who's now a toddler involved here. So that is a blessing ... but this mix-up should never have happened.”
In fact, Palaszczuk is precisely wrong. Only in the “modern age” could a “bungle” like this happen, because only in this age is such a mistake possible. The modern IVF industry began in 1978, when the first successful IVF pregnancy and live birth took place in the United Kingdom with the birth of Louise Brown on July 25. Since then, an entire industry has sprung up specializing in the ex-utero creation of human beings in the millions, with millions being discarded and millions more being stored in freezers in virtual perpetuity. Each child born via IVF represents many more who died in the process; only 7 percent of embryos created via IVF will result in a live birth, with 93 percent of these children frozen, miscarried, or aborted.
Only in our modern era would headlines like “Biological parents of baby born to wrong couple in IVF bungle have no legal right to child” make any sense whatsoever. Only today would the tragedy of parents grappling with the reality that their biological child being raised by another family not due to adoption or choice but because of a “bungle” even be possible. These stories are possible because in our modern age, our technological capabilities vastly outstrip our moral understanding – and thus we have created a market for children, in which such “bungles” are not only possible but inevitable.
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