SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) - We're taking a closer look at the legal battle ahead for a Savannah woman who unknowingly gave birth to someone else's child.
The IVF clinic she went to, Coastal Fertility Specialist in Savannah, used the wrong embryo. Now, Krystena Murray is suing for negligence and demands a jury trial.
Murray carried the child for 9 months, gave birth to him, and then took care of him for 5 months only to have to give him back to his biological parents.
"The actions of the fertility clinic have come very close to destroy me, have left irreparable damage to my soul and ultimately left me questioning whether I should be a mom or not," Murray said.
Murray's attorney, Adam Wolf, says this is more common that you might think.
"I've represented over a thousand people against their fertility clinics for mishaps or other types of misconduct at their fertility clinics," Wolf said.
He tells News 3, this is due to a lack of state and federal regulation. He and some other lawyers in Georgia are demanding reporting requirements and mandatory certification programs for lab staff.
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the issue is complex. Timothy Lytton, a regents' professor at Georgia State University College of Law, agrees.
"It's not totally unregulated, but is a relatively new industry. The regulations vary widely from state to state. The federal government's regulations also are sort of a patchwork. And as a result, a lot of this falls on the civil courts," Lytton said.
"The harm here was not the birth of the child. These people wanted to keep the child," Lytton said. "The harm was having to carry a child for no good reason, because they couldn't keep that child and the pain and suffering and the emotional damage and physical wear and tear that goes along with that.
"That kind of liability exposure often keeps companies on their toes, and it's a very important part of the way we regulate in the united states," Lytton said.
Lytton tells News 3, he thinks Murray will win this case. To this day, she still doesn't know where her embryos are.
The lawsuit names Coastal Fertility Specialists and Dr. Jeffrey Gray, its director of the embryology laboratory, as defendants. In a statement, Coastal Fertility Specialists tells Today their staff “deeply regrets the distress caused by an unprecedented error that resulted in an embryo transfer mix-up.”
“This was an isolated event with no further patients affected. The same day this error was discovered we immediately conducted an in-depth review and put additional safeguards in place to further protect patients and to ensure that such an incident does not happen again,” the statement read in part.