NATIONAL ‘Unintended parentage’
Accidentally switched embryos. Wrong sperm. The burgeoning field of assisted procreation can involve serious medical blunders, experts are warning, including “misdirected” embryos — embryos that end up in the wrong woman’s body.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine, in a newly published article, says fertility clinics have an ethical obligation to immediately disclose mistakes that could result in babies born with a “different genetic parentage than intended.”
That could include inseminating a woman with the wrong sperm, combining the wrong sperm with the wrong eggs or transferring the wrong embryos to the wrong uterus — devastating errors that can result in babies being born to couples that were intended for someone else, the society’s ethics committee writes in the latest edition of the journal, Fertility and Sterility.
Such calamities, experts insist, are rare, and while the body representing Canada’s largely forprofit fertility industry says it is unaware of any cases of “misdirected” embryos here, there has been a smattering of reports of IVF mix-ups in the U.S. and elsewhere that have led to emotionally wrought battles to determine legal parentage and custody.
In 1999, a New York State woman of Italian descent gave birth to twin boys — one white, the other black. The woman had undergone an embryo transfer at a Manhattan fertility clinic the same day a black couple were also undergoing IVF. But an embryo from the black woman ended up in the white woman, reportedly because the pipette hadn’t been properly flushed between transfers. Only the white woman became pregnant.
“The couples initially agreed to a shared custody agreement, but ended up in a custody dispute,” said Toronto fertility lawyer Sherry Levitan. “The genetic parents won.”
Levitan was involved in a case about 15 years ago involving a Toronto-area couple. An embryo was created using a donor egg and what was supposed to be sperm from the male partner. A surrogate carried the embryo. As part of a court application to obtain a Declaration of Parentage, DNA testing was performed. “The DNA testing came back, and nobody was related to the child,” Levitan said. “They ran (the test) again. It wasn’t a DNA mistake; it was clearly a laboratory mix-up. We don’t know if it was an embryo mix-up or a sperm mix-up.”
The parents chose not to sue for negligence, because they didn’t want to risk losing the child.
In 2013, Ottawa’s Dr. Norman Barwin, a once-acclaimed fertility doctor and a past president of Planned Parenthood Canada was banned from practicing for two months by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario disciplinary panel after admitting to artificially inseminating three women with the wrong semen over a two-decade period. The children are likely now in their 20s.
No one knows how often semen or embryo mishaps may have occurred in Canada. Levitan said that while DNA tests are always done in surrogacy cases, they aren’t typically performed for routine IVF.
“In other words, most people never check to make sure that the baby they deliver is the baby that they expect.”
In the U.K., the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a government watchdog, reports on adverse incidents in fertility clinics. More than 1,600 incidents were reported between 2010 and 2012. While most were classed as “less serious,” errors ranged from incorrectly labelled pots and tubes and pipettes containing eggs that were accidentally dropped, to dishes containing the embryos of 11 patients contaminated with “cellular debris that may have contained sperm.”
A Canadian agency that was struck to license clinics, establish a registry and otherwise be a model of the British fertility oversight body was shuttered in 2012.
In Canada, private fertility clinics accredited by Accreditation Canada (a voluntary program) have disclosure policies mirroring those required of hospitals, said Mark Evans, of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Those policies state all “critical incidents” must be reported and errors investigated and tracked, he said. Provincial regulatory colleges also have policies on disclosing harm.
Labs as well follow a “rigid process of validating patient identity at every interaction with the patient and every time gametes (sperm, eggs or embryos) are manipulated or moved,” Evans said.
“I assure you that this is of primary importance to everybody,” added CFAS president Dr. Heather Shapiro. “There isn’t a clinic that doesn’t want to make sure that the embryos go into the right people. It would be the highest priority for everybody.”
“There are all sorts of checks, and double checks and labelling and two people signing off on things,” Shapiro added.
Levitan said patients should verify samples themselves. “Before sperm is used for an IUI (intrauterine insemination), before embryos are transferred for an IVF, they should be looking at the samples and making sure it’s their name on the label,” she said.
“Don’t just let a nurse read it out to you — look at it.”
ST. PETERS BAY, P.E.I. — It spent almost eight years on the market, but a beachfront P.E.I. mansion has just been sold for what is believed to be an Island record.
Real-estate agent Michael Poczynek says the roughly 1,250-square-metre house in Cable Head East sold for around its current asking price — $4.75 million, which is the highest figure he knows of based on a database of Island listings.
Poczynek says the six-bedroom home had been advertised for millions of dollar more, but the owner, Pennsylvania architect James Carr, decided to drop the price after years on the market produced only a handful of showings.
The agent says the Island’s housing market is “under the radar” and it is possible the home was originally overpriced.
Poczynek says the 4.5-hectare property, complete with a “private” beach, was purchased by a North American businessman who plans to use it as a summer home as well as offering it for short-term rentals.
Poczynek says no was expense spared in designing the home, including a four-storey whale watching tower, accessible via spiral staircase.
He says the owner hasn’t seen any whales, but it’s still a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean. — The Canadian Press