When Krystena Murray was asked as a child what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she wanted to be a mother.
In 2023, the 38-year-old woman from Savannah became pregnant through in vitro fertilization and couldn’t wait to realize her dream of motherhood. But, five months after giving birth to the boy, a DNA test confirmed her fears — she was not the child’s biological mother.
Murray is white, and she knew something was amiss when she saw the baby was Black.
On Tuesday, she filed a lawsuit against Coastal Fertility Specialists, alleging the South Carolina-based company with a clinic in Georgia implanted the wrong embryo in her uterus. The child’s biological parents have since taken custody of the boy.
“My first thought is, ‘He’s beautiful.' My second thought was, ‘What happened?’” she said in an online Tuesday news conference during which she and her attorneys announced the suit. “Did they mess up the embryo, or did they mess up the sperm? And if they messed up the embryo, can someone take my son?”
Coastal Fertility Specialists, in a Tuesday statement, apologized for the incident and said it “does not reflect the level of excellence and trust we strive to uphold.”
The statement said, in part: “Coastal Fertility Specialists deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up. While this ultimately led to the birth of a healthy child, we recognize the profound impact this situation has had on the affected families, and we extend our sincerest apologies.”
Murray spent nearly two years trying to get pregnant with the help of physicians. She underwent IVF with Coastal Fertility Specialists, during which a physician retrieved her eggs and fertilized them to create embryos in a lab.
She selected a sperm donor whose features matched hers and was overjoyed to become pregnant and give birth to a healthy, beautiful baby boy. But after he was born, her joy turned to confusion and fear that he could be taken from her.
Her complaint alleges the fertility center placed the wrong embryo in her womb — an embryo belonging to another couple who also sought IVF treatment through the same clinic. That couple, who now have custody of the child Murray gave birth to, have not been identified by Murray or her attorneys.
Murray filed the lawsuit to “seek accountability from Coastal Fertility and its employees for their reckless misconduct that led to this preventable nightmare,” according to the complaint, provided to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by her attorneys. The suit seeks financial damages and demands a jury trial.
The clinic, in its statement, said it is “doing everything we can to make things right for those affected by this incident.” That includes putting “additional safeguards in place to further protect patients and to ensure that such an incident does not happen again.”
Clinic representatives did not immediately respond to questions from the AJC about the incident and how it occurred. Jeffrey Gray, the clinic’s laboratory director, is also named in the suit; he could not be reached by email or phone for comment.
Murray is represented by the law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise. Her attorney, Adam Wolf, said the firm has represented more than 1,000 people across the U.S. in cases against fertility clinics, including those involving destroyed or lost embryos, IVF mix-ups and other errors with reproductive materials.
“This is not the first IVF mix-up case that I’ve handled, and sadly, it will not be the last,” Wolf said. “The United States is one of the few developed countries without meaningful oversight over fertility clinic laboratories. Until IVF clinics are subject to real regulations, reporting requirements and mandatory certification programs for lab staff, these types of errors will continue to occur.”
Murray said she doesn’t know what happened to her embryos. Coastal Fertility called the situation “an isolated event with no further patients affected.”
Murray said she loved, breastfed and cared for the baby for months as she sought to figure out what happened. After the baby’s biological parents were informed of the mix-up, they took legal action to get custody of him, according to the lawsuit.
“To carry a baby, to fall in love with him, to deliver him, to build that uniquely special bond between a mother and a child, all to have them taken away,” Murray said. “I’ll never be the same woman.”
During a family court case in South Carolina, she agreed to hand over the child that she said she had no legal right to keep.
“I did what was best for him and made that process as quick and easy as possible,” she said. “He could go and bond with his new family, and that this would not be something that would have lifelong effects on him.”
Now, she is working with another clinic because she still hopes to become a mother, despite the pain and heartache that came after her last pregnancy.
“The birth of my child was supposed to be the happiest moment of my life, and honestly, it was, but it was also the scariest moment of my life,” Murray said.
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