She carried the baby and gave birth to her, but after a few months, Daphna Cardinale and her husband, Alexander, realized something was terribly wrong.
The baby wasn’t theirs, and it was all because of an in vitro fertilization mix-up.
In vitro fertilization involves joining a woman’s egg with a man’s sperm in a laboratory dish. It’s a procedure sometimes offered to couples experiencing infertility, according to MedlinePlus.
Cardinale said the fertility clinic they visited accidentally implanted her embryo — made from her egg and her husband’s sperm — into another woman, and that woman’s embryo into her, she told People Magazine on Nov. 23.
The nightmare began for the Los Angeles couple in September 2019, after they brought their newborn baby home.
Would you be able to give up a baby you had given birth to and cared for for 3 months straight?
“It was one of the happiest moments of our lives,” Alexander Cardinale told People.
As the months passed, however, they began wondering why their baby, May, looked nothing like either of them.
After much reluctance, the couple decided to try an at-home DNA test.
“And that’s when our world started falling apart,” Alexander said.
“This is unfathomable,” says Adam Wolf, attorney for Daphna and Alexander Cardinale, a CA couple who filed a lawsuit which says a LA-based fertility clinic implanted the wrong embryos into two women during in vitro fertilization procedures, resulting in a life-changing mix-up. pic.twitter.com/ng39CIHIvJ
— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) November 10, 2021
Upon receiving the results of the test, the Cardinales learned there was a 99.9 percent likelihood neither of them was the parent of the child, The New York Times reported.
The couple hired an attorney to get to the bottom of the debacle, hoping another couple had accidentally received the Cardinale embryo, according to People.
In December 2019, they discovered that was indeed the case.
Another couple, who remains anonymous, had received the wrong embryo, The Times reported.
After both couples confirmed the DNA results, they met each other’s children for the first time before figuring out how they would legally swap them.
“The moment my hands went under my daughter’s arms and we locked eyes, something powerful and unexpected washed over me. I knew this child,” Alexander said. “At the same time, Daphna and I were so devastated and sad … about losing our birth daughter.”
The couples came up with an unheard-of solution to this problem.
“What if we don’t ‘let go’? What if we just have 2 babies? We share them,” Daphna suggested to the other couple. “We have to find a way to have both babies. Spend a lot of time together. Raise these girls together,” she said.
The other couple agreed.
In the five years since the mix-up, the couples have lived up to their arrangement, meeting often, the U.K.’s Daily Mail reported.
May and Zoe went to the same preschool, and although they went to a different kindergarten, they still see each other at least once a week.
“There’s no book for this,” Alexander told People.
“There’s no person to give you advice. So we ended up just sort of huddling together, the four of us, and it’s a blessing that we all are on the same page. We’ve spent every holiday together since then. We’ve spent every birthday together since then — and we’ve just kind of blended the families.”
The Cardinales are suing their physician, Dr. Eliran Mor, along with his lab, which allegedly handled the embryo transfer. The Cardinales are also suing the fertility clinic, the California Center for Reproductive Health.
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