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A Florida woman is suing an Orlando-area fertility clinic after an in vitro fertilization (IVF) mix-up allegedly led to her giving birth to someone else’s biological child.
In a lawsuit filed against the Fertility Center of Orlando and doctor Milton McNichol on January 9, a 41-year-old woman and her 43-year-old partner — identified in the suit only as Jane Doe and John Doe — say they wanted to start a family and began working with the Longwood, Florida-based clinic to cryogenically store three viable embryos created using their own genetic material. In March 2025, clinic staff implanted one of the embryos into the woman’s uterus, and nine months later, on December 11, she gave birth to a “beautiful, healthy” baby girl.
But while both the woman and her partner are white, the woman birthed a “very dark-skinned” baby who appears to be Asian-American, the couple’s attorney, Jack Scarola, tells New Times. Genetic testing later confirmed that the newborn has no relationship to either parent.
The lawsuit — which alleges the clinic implanted the wrong embryo in the woman — asks a judge to immediately order the clinic to notify affected patients, pay for genetic testing, and disclose any cases in the past five years in which children born through its IVF services may not be biologically related to their parents.
“The heartbreaking and unexplained in vitro fertilization errors described in our recently filed lawsuit remain unresolved,” Scarola, a partner at the West Palm Beach-based law firm Searcy, Denney, Scarola, Barnhart and Shipley, tells New Times. “While our clients continue to fall more deeply in love with a beautiful little girl who is someone else’s child, they are also living with the unbearable knowledge that there may be one or more of their own children unknowingly in the care of strangers.”
Scarola says that to make matters worse, the clinic has been “totally uncooperative” in helping remedy the error.
He adds that another fertility patient could have given birth to his clients’ biological child and, in the absence of any obvious racial difference, may never know they are not raising their own baby.
“[Other patients] need to know about what has happened here. Presumably, there is some client of that clinic whose baby we have, who has a right to know that we have that baby,” he says. “And as much as my clients have fallen in love with this child and would be very happy if they never had to give her up, they recognize the fact that her genetic parents and she herself have a right to be united with one another.”
McNichol is the medical director at the Longwood fertility center, where he “leads a compassionate, patient-focused team dedicated to providing the most advanced fertility treatments,” according to the clinic’s website. The board-certified reproductive endocrinologist has more than 20 years of experience in fertility care, having obtained his medical degree from Loma Linda University and completed his residency in obstetrics and gynecology at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles.
Florida Department of Health records show the agency previously investigated a complaint against McNichol after a routine inspection at the clinic in June 2023 revealed that some staff were not properly registered, important equipment and medication were missing, and employees were, in some cases, using “inappropriate sterilization techniques.”
McNichol was reprimanded with a $5,000 fine and required to complete a five-hour rules and ethics course and a five-hour risk management course. His medical license remains active.
Neither the fertility clinic nor McNichol responded to New Times’ requests for comment by phone or email. The clinic referred New Times to a public relations firm, which had not responded as of publication.
While the lawsuit was originally filed in Palm Beach County, a judge ordered it transferred to either Orange County or Seminole County. The fertility center is based in Longwood, a suburb of Seminole County just north of Orlando. Scarola says the couple resides in South Central Florida.
Although IVF clinic mix-ups are believed to be extremely rare, the couple’s case isn’t the first of its kind.
In 2019, a New York couple sued a California fertility clinic, alleging its doctors implanted embryos that belonged to two other couples, a discovery the plaintiffs made after giving birth to twins. In 2021, two couples sued a different California clinic after a mix-up there led the couples to spend several months raising each other’s biological children before they swapped. And last year, a Georgia woman sued a fertility clinic after she gave birth to a child that was not hers, only to eventually give the child up to his biological parents – effectively making the woman an unwitting surrogate.
There’s notably no federal regulation of IVF in the United States to prevent mix-ups, Dov Fox, a law professor at the University of San Diego, told NBC News in February 2025. There’s also no federal mandate requiring U.S. clinics to report such incidents, he said.
This is a breaking story and will be updated as events warrant.
