Fertility Clinic Mistake

October 14, 2009  
Filed under Opinion

How would you feel if you were married, had a nice job and pregnant? Most people would feel joy of extending their families. How you would feel if you had gotten a call that you were pregnant but it was not your child?

Carolyn Savage 40 just got this news the other day but also found out that she was carrying someone else’s child.  In February, Savage and her husband Sean had used a fertility clinic to conceive one more child before they were too old. Ten days later, the doctor from the clinic and called to congratulate them. They were going to have a baby, but there was a twist: they were pregnant with another family’s child.

The other family was the Morell’s, who also got the call that they were expecting a child that was in someone else’s body. This was Savage’s last chance to have a child, but she will give the baby back to its rightful parents. She will hire a surrogate mother to give them their last child. They plan on going to court for the clinic’s mistake, and the Savages are hoping the clinic will take full credit for the mistake.

Fertility clinics make mistakes every once and awhile, but should it keep happening? I don’t think it should since people pay good money to have doctors help them get pregnant. Clinics should mark the frozen embryos to the respective parents and put them into the computer and check to make sure that each is labeled correctly. No one knows how the mistakes happen, but the fact is they do.

When the women find out that they are carrying someone else’s child they tend to get a little upset and rightfully so. Many cases have led to nasty visitation rights and legal battles between custody. This procedure has only been inadequate just a few times, but each time battles for children get uglier. Mothers who have carried the child have a certain bond with the baby, but now someone else has come into the picture and is now taking her baby away. Mothers tend to get violent in cases because they want to keep the child that they have the right to because she has fed, clothed and housed the child since it was conceived.

Clinics should have a limit to how many times they make a mistake with the embryos just because they are being sloppy about things. Doctors need to do their jobs properly and implant the right embryo into the right mother. If this was me, I would be very upset. I would not want to have another family’s baby and them having mine. In a pregnancy a mother must take care of her child even though it isn’t born yet. Every day the mother bonds with the unborn child. But when she finds out that it isn’t her baby she then has to detach herself from the unborn child or a child that is a few years old and knows only her.

At the same time, though, the biological mother is thinking that she is going to her lost child back but doesn’t think about the child. While it all depends on the age, what if the child didn’t want to go live with the biological mother? They also have to put their views into it also. If a toddler gets taken away from the mother they have always known how will that affect them? Will they get attached to the biological mother? I think there is an extent of how you take matters when dealing with a child. They don’t understand what is going on just when they get taken away from someone they have known as their mother for a year or so it doesn’t matter, it still hurts them.

Clinics need to get this problem resolved and quickly. They are hurting more and more parents and children with the more mistakes that are made. If they can’t get it right then I think they should shut down their facility. If you can’t do it right, then don’t do it at ALL!

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Chelsea McComb

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