CLINIC SUED FOR EMBRYO ERROR
Qns. ma birthed Calif. woman’s baby after slipup
couple Anni and Ashot Manukyan say they were delivered into a nightmare when a horrific in vitro fertilization mixup led to the implantation of their embryo in a complete stranger living in Queens.
The Flushing woman later gave birth to their son in New York on March 31 alongside another baby boy from yet another pair of strangers.
No one comprehended the monumental mistake until the shocked Queens woman saw the infant boys and realized they didn’t match either her Korean-American background or the two female embryos she created with her husband and consented to having implanted.
The Armenian-American parents from Glendale, Calif., said Wednesday they’re now suing CHA Fertility Center in Los Angeles over the harrowing ordeal, which led to a court battle over custody of their son.
“We had to fight for him, and she was fighting for him on the other end,” Anni told the Daily News on Wednesday, speaking alongside her Los Angeles lawyer Adam Wolf.
“She fought hard for him,” she said of the Flushing woman she considers a fellow victim. “They were saying anything to keep him.”
Anni and her husband worked with New York lawyer Eric Wrubel in the landmark custody case.
“He told us he’d never done anything like this before, but he promised to get our son, and he did,” she told The News. “In the end, genetics is genetics. He’s ours.”
Speaking at a press conference earlier Wednesday, Anni said it was “tense and heartbreaking” meeting the Flushing woman.
“She raised my baby inside of her womb, you know, and she took care of him even after he was born, and I’m eternally grateful to her. She’s a lovely woman, and we were just all victims together, we’re not against each other, none of us,” she said.
She slammed CHA for its negligence, saying the clinic “robbed me of my ability to carry my own child, my baby boy, to be with him in the first couple moments of his life, to nurse him.”
She trusted CHA, she said, especially after it helped her conceive her now 7-year-old daughter through IVF.
Explaining her ordeal in excruciating detail, Anni said CHA told her she had two viable embryos left after her daughter’s birth and after a semisuccessful “thaw” of her remaining three.
She was implanted with what she thought were her two remaining ones Aug. 20, the same day she believes the Flushing woman visited CHA for implantation.
One of Anni’s embryos obviously went to the New York couple, and she’s not sure if the other one was among the two she received, or if it’s somewhere else.
“We live with the uncertainty that another embryo of ours may be born to someone else. I don’t understand [how] CHA could have done this to us. This is the most important thing in our life, our family,” she said.
Ashot, a soft-spoken man who called his kids “the love of my life,” said the experience left them feeling like “zomCalifornia bies.”
This case is believed to be the first time in U.S. history that a family has had to go to court to recover their offspring from a mother who unwittingly bore a child as a result of a fertilitycenter error, Wolf said.
“This case is among the most egregious I have ever seen,” Wolf said.
The Flushing couple, meanwhile, has filed a separate medical-malpractice and negligence lawsuit against CHA and two of its physicians, Dr. Joshua Berger and Dr. Simon Hong.
In their 29-page complaint filed last week in Brooklyn Federal Court, the Queens couple said they married in August 2012 and immediately “desired to conceive, deliver and raise children of their own.”
When attempts to conceive through natural measures and artificial insemination failed, they learned about CHA and spent more than $100,000 on the company’s services.
In July 2018, the couple had one female embryo transferred, but it did not result in a pregnancy.
A month later, the couple tried again with what they thought were two more of their female embryos. In September, the wife learned she was pregnant.
“Plaintiffs were ecstatic to learn that after years of trying to conceive, they had success and were pregnant with twins,” their New York lawsuit states.
At their three and fivemonth sonograms, the Queens couple were advised they appeared to be carrying boys, leading to considerable confusion. But Dr. Berger and Dr. Hong dismissed the sonogram results as inconclusive, saying they were “not a definitive test,” the lawsuit claims.
Dr. Berger even regaled the couple with a story of how his own wife was told she was having a boy but ultimately had a girl, according to the complaint.
When the Flushing woman delivered the boys via caesarean section, she was “shocked” at their genders and ethnicity, their lawsuit states.
Genetic testing ultimately confirmed the two babies were not related to the couple and indeed were not related to each other.
“Unbeknownst to plaintiffs at the time, defendants investigated the matter and contacted two other couples who went for treatment at CHA Fertility,” the lawsuit claims.
“As a result, plaintiffs were required to relinquish custody of Baby A and Baby B, thus suffering the loss of two children,” it says. “Plaintiffs have suffered significant and permanent emotional injuries for which they will not recover.”