A Georgia woman has sued a fertility clinic after being implanted with someone else’s embryo, giving birth to the child and then being forced to give up custody to the biological parents.
“I have never felt so violated, and the situation has left me emotionally and physically broken,” 38-year-old Krystena Murray told reporters at a news conference Tuesday after filing the lawsuit in Chatham County. “I spent my entire life wanting to be a mom. I loved, nurtured and grew my child, and I would have done literally anything to keep him.”
Murray, who’s single, had harvested her eggs, chosen a sperm donor and undergone IVF treatments at Coastal Fertility Specialists, a company based in South Carolina with a satellite facility in Savannah, where she lived.
After getting pregnant in 2023, she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who was Black. Since both Murray and her sperm donor were white, she surmised he was not her biological child, and took a DNA test. That bore out her suspicions, and she alerted the clinic to make sure it wouldn’t happen to someone else.
Murray, having fallen in love with the child immediately, fully intended to raise him and she did so for five months. But the clinic tracked down his biological parents, and they sued for custody. She settled with them in family court last May, handing over her beloved baby, both for his own good and to avoid what her attorneys said was an unwinnable legal battle.
To this day Murray does not know what happened to her own embryo, and wonders if it was implanted into someone else and is being raised by another set of parents, her attorney said, adding that it’s not even clear how the mix-up occurred.
Murray’s civil suit accuses the clinic of negligence with an “extreme and outrageous” mistake that turned her into “an unwitting surrogate, against her will, for another couple.” She’s seeking unspecified monetary damages.
Coastal Fertility Specialists said in a statement Tuesday that it “deeply regrets the distress” of the “unprecedented error” and has added new safeguards.
“This was an isolated event with no further patients affected,” the company said. “We are doing everything we can to make things right for those affected by this incident.”
But Murray said she’s still traumatized.
“To carry a baby, fall in love with him, deliver him and build the uniquely special bond between mother and baby, all to have him taken away,” she said, according to The Washington Post. “I’ll never fully recover from this.”
With News Wire Services
Leave a comment