White Mother Sues Fertility Clinic After Birthing Black Baby, Claims ‘Irreparable Damage’ As She’s Forced to Give Him Up

Krystena Murray has spent most of her life dreaming of motherhood, and in 2023, the now-38-year-old went through the arduous and sometimes painful process of in vitro fertilization (IVF) to get pregnant. 

But when her baby was born, Murray, a single woman who is white, was shocked to see that her new child was a dark-skinned Black boy. The sperm donor she had chosen had similar features to her — a white man with dirty blond hair and blue eyes.

“My first thought was he’s beautiful,” Murray, a wedding planner who lives in Savannah, said in an online press conference on Tuesday. “My second thought was, ‘What happened? Did they mess up the embryo? Can someone take my son?’ That was all within the course of the first 10 or 15 seconds of me seeing him.”

“What was supposed to be the happiest moment of my life — and honestly, it was — was also the scariest moment of my life,” she said. “While my child was born healthy and he remains the most beautiful human I will ever lay eyes on, it was immediately apparent that something did not go to plan.”

In the ensuing several months, her worst nightmares about having a child through IVF came true. 

An at-home DNA test soon confirmed what she suspected and feared that she was not biologically related to her newborn child. The fertility clinic she had entrusted with her life’s greatest ambition had made a colossal error and implanted an unknown African-American couple’s embryo into her womb.

In February of 2024, her attorney contacted the clinic, whose staff then determined who the biological parents likely were among their clientele and let them know what had occurred. After another DNA test confirmed the boy was theirs, the couple took legal action, demanding custody of their son. By May, Murray was tearfully handing over to strangers the five-month-old baby she says she had by that point breastfed, nurtured and become fiercely attached to in a family court in South Carolina.

“My baby is not genetically mine. … But he is and will always be my son,” Murray said. “To carry a baby, to fall in love with him, to deliver him, to build that uniquely special bond between a mother and a child, all to have them taken away; I’ll never be the same woman.”

Murray is now suing Coastal Fertility Specialists, the South Carolina-based clinic responsible for the heartbreaking, staggering mixup. 

Her complaint, filed in a Georgia state court on Feb. 18, charges the clinic, its director of the embryology laboratory, Dr. Jeffrey Gray, and five clinic staff members with gross negligence in how they handled, labeled, stored and used Murray’s genetic material, against her express directives; for failing to have or to comply with protocols and procedures to ensure that such misuse could never happen; and reckless and negligent conduct that “fell far below the standard of care” for clinics offering cryopreservation and fertility services.

As a direct result of the defendants’ negligence, the lawsuit says, Murray suffered extreme emotional, property, physical, and economic damages in an amount her attorneys seek to prove in a jury trial. 

“Life will never be the same for Ms. Murray,” the complaint says. “She was turned into an unwitting surrogate, against her will, for another couple.” 

Once the clinic’s error of implanting the wrong embryo came to light, the lawsuit says, “Ms. Murray’s Baby was ripped away from her,” and her “connection to the child has been erased: his birth certificate has been changed to the new name the Stranger Couple later chose for the child; and he lives with the Stranger Couple, who have full custody, in a different state from Ms. Murray,” who will likely never see the child again.

“I would have done literally anything in my power to keep my baby,” Murray told reporters. Still, when she came to realize that legally she had no options, “I did what was best for him” and relinquished custody “with the hopes that this would hopefully not affect him and his growth and development in the future, that he could go and bond with his new family.” 

Compounding her trauma, the lawsuit says, Murray does not know if Coastal Fertility transferred to yet another couple an embryo that belonged to her and if her biologically related child is being raised by anyone else.

Murray’s attorney, Adam Wolf, a partner at the law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, said at the press conference that Murray has not been able to get answers from the fertility clinic as to whether any of her embryos are still in storage there, or how they may have been used.

“This is the cardinal sin for fertility clinics, to transfer the wrong embryo into one of your patients. It should never happen,” he said.

In a statement attributed to executive director Isabel Bryan posted on Tuesday, Coastal Fertility Specialists said it “deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up. While this ultimately led to the birth of a healthy child, we recognize the profound impact this situation has had on the affected families, and we extend our sincerest apologies.”

The clinic further said, “We hold ourselves to the highest standards of care and responsibility. This incident, while isolated in our 15-year history, does not reflect the level of excellence and trust we strive to uphold,” adding that it “was an isolated event with no further patients affected. The same day this error was discovered we immediately conducted an in-depth review and put additional safeguards in place to further protect patients and to ensure that such an incident does not happen again.”

“We are doing everything we can to make things right for those affected by this incident. We will continue to uphold the integrity of our practice and our commitment to supporting families in their journey to parenthood.”

“This is not the first IVF mix-up case I’ve handled and sadly it will not be the last,” said Wolf, whose firm has represented more than a thousand clients in legal actions against fertility clinics “for things like dropping people’s embryos on the ground, for mixing up embryos, for creating embryos with the wrong sperm or the wrong eggs, freezers malfunction and there being no backup alarms … all of these things that can have a dramatic effect on families.”

Lack of regulation is the driver of many IVF clinic mishaps, he said. 

“Unfortunately the United States is one of the few developed countries without meaningful oversight over fertility clinic laboratories. Until IVF clinics are subject to real regulations, reporting requirements and mandatory certification programs for lab staff, these types of errors will continue to occur.”

Murray said part of the reason she’s going public with the tragic outcome of her IVF pregnancy is to “hopefully see change and see that this doesn’t affect other couples or individuals or anyone who’s trying to start a family. Hopefully, there will be better regulations and better policy and procedures at clinics, safety checks, and hard stops that can prevent errors like this from happening.”

She said the agonizing experience of losing her son through the botched IVF process has “come very close to destroying me” and “left irreparable damage to my soul and ultimately left me questioning whether I should be a mom or not.”

 “I will never fully heal or completely move on, and part of me will always long for my son and wonder what kind of person he’s becoming,” she said.

But Murray said she has not given up on motherhood and has recently “started the process over again with another clinic. I’m hoping in the next year or two to try again.”