When Florida-based Tiffany Score delivered a healthy baby girl on December 11, 2025, she expected the moment she had spent years preparing for: fertility treatments, a nursery, parenting classes, all of it pointed toward this. Instead, the birth set off a legal and ethical crisis that has rattled the American fertility industry to its core.
Ms. Score and her partner, Steven Mills, are both white. The baby they named Shea was not. Genetic testing confirmed what the couple feared: the wrong embryo had been implanted, and Shea was not genetically related to either parent.
A judge ordered weekly hearings in the case, filed against the Fertility Center of Orlando, as the couple sought to identify the biological parents of their daughter and determine the fate of their own missing embryos.
The clinic, in a statement it later deleted, said it was “actively cooperating with an investigation to support one of our patients in determining the source of an error that resulted in the birth of a child who is not genetically related to them.” Then, on March 30, the clinic closed its operations entirely, a development that came as legal proceedings were still grinding forward and the couple’s own embryos were still unaccounted for.
“We recognize that we have a moral obligation to find her genetic parents,” Ms. Score wrote publicly, appealing to anyone with information to come forward.
Washington has made expanding access to IVF a bipartisan priority. What it has not done is ask what happens when the clinics get it catastrophically wrong.
A system built on voluntary compliance
The fertility industry in America operates under a framework that is, at best, a patchwork. In 1992, Congress passed the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act, requiring physicians who perform IVF to report procedures and outcomes to the CDC. That law established a framework to track outcomes; however, its scope has always been narrow.
Fertility clinics face no obligation, at the state or federal level, to report how many embryos are created, discarded, lost, or mistakenly swapped with another couple’s embryos.
In April 2025, the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the CDC’s six-person Assisted Reproductive Technology Surveillance team. Those inside the industry warned the move risked a return to conditions last seen before the 1992 law, when clinics routinely advertised IVF success rates of greater than 80 percent with no basis in fact.
The Senate Appropriations Committee directed the CDC to restore the surveillance work, but no concrete action has followed. The administration has meanwhile pursued making IVF more affordable and covered by more insurers as a policy priority.
300 lawsuits and no one is counting
The scale of the problem can only be estimated through litigation, because no official registry exists. More than 300 lawsuits were filed between 2019 and 2024 alleging that embryos had been destroyed, lost, or accidentally swapped.
More than 100,000 babies are born each year in America using IVF, so the number of lawsuits is relatively small by comparison. But the volume, according to legal experts, is high for medical malpractice and reflects the fertility industry’s breakneck expansion: the number of babies born through assisted reproductive technology more than quadrupled from 1996 to 2022.
A peer-reviewed analysis of malpractice claims across ten reproductive endocrinology practices over a decade found that embryology laboratory errors were the most frequent cause of claims, accounting for 38 percent of claims paid, with an average settlement of $199,188.
The study identified improper labeling and communication failures as the most common root causes.
Why nothing changes
IVF commands bipartisan political support. But founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, Arthur Caplan, says the core problem has never really changed.
“There never has been very much regulation,” he tells the Sun. At the state level, he says, “there’s virtually no scrutiny of who can use IVF, no screening, no background checks. They don’t do the things that adoption agencies do.”
Professor Hank Greely of Stanford School of Medicine is similarly skeptical. Effective mandatory reporting, he tells the Sun, “would require federal or state legislation, which seems politically unlikely.”
Without the CDC surveillance team, he points out, the practical answer to who is now holding fertility clinics accountable is matter-of-fact.
“Probably only plaintiffs’ lawyers,” Mr. Greely notes.
There is a strong contingent opposed to more robust regulation of the industry. The industry’s own professional body, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, contends that IVF is already heavily regulated.
Meanwhile, some religious organizations oppose the procedure on moral grounds entirely. They oppose the destruction of embryos – a common practice since the treatments involve fertilizing and cultivating several embryos, and choosing the most robust embryos for implantation. Unused embryos are either frozen for future use (which can cost a couple more than $1,000 a year), donated or destroyed.
The result is a strange political coalition in which industry and ideological opponents alike, for entirely different reasons, have resisted more regulation.
What accountability could look like
Attorney Adam Wolf, who specializes in landmark fertility and embryo-loss litigation, argues the fixes are neither complicated nor expensive.
“Until there are real, meaningful changes in terms of oversight and regulation, these types of horrible mistakes are going to continue,” he tells the Sun.
Mr. Wolf calls for unannounced inspections.
“If a clinic knew that at any moment an inspector could come in and see what’s going on, so much of the sloppiness, the ability to act with relative impunity, would disappear,” Mr. Wolf says.
Mr. Caplan, meanwhile, flags surrogacy as the industry’s most urgent blind spot.
“There are some very sleazy operations out there that are exploiting women,” he stresses. “That’s where I’d start.”
For the likes of Ms. Score and Mr. Mills, the court process has now outlasted the clinic itself. The Fertility Center of Orlando shuttered at the end of March. Their own embryos are still unaccounted for.
Source: NY Sun April 3 2026
