Australian woman unknowingly gives birth to a stranger's baby after IVF clinic error

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A woman in Australia unknowingly gave birth to a stranger’s baby after she received another patient's embryo from her in vitro fertilization clinic due to “human error,” the clinic said.

The mix-up was discovered in February when the clinic in the city of Brisbane found that the birth parents had one too many embryos in storage, said the provider, Monash IVF, in a statement supplied Friday. Staff discovered an embryo from another patient had been mistakenly thawed and transferred to the birth mother, a spokesperson said.

Australia news outlets reported the baby was born in 2024. Monash IVF didn't confirm how old the child was.

The company, one of Australia’s biggest IVF providers, said an initial investigation had not uncovered any other such errors. Its statement didn’t identify the patients involved or divulge details about the child's custody.

“All of us at Monash IVF are devastated and we apologise to everyone involved,” said CEO Michael Knaap. “We will continue to support the patients through this extremely distressing time.”

The “human error” was made “despite strict laboratory safety protocols being in place,” the statement said. The company said it had reported the episode to the relevant regulator in the state of Queensland.

Monash IVF opened in 1971 and sees patients in dozens of locations throughout Australia. Last year, the firm settled a class-action lawsuit from more than 700 patients, making no admission of liability, after claims its clinics destroyed potentially viable embryos.

The clinic paid a settlement of 56 million Australian dollars ($35 million).

Rare cases of embryo mix-ups have been reported before, including in the United States, Britain, Israel and Europe. A woman in the U.S. state of Georgia in February filed a lawsuit against a fertility clinic after she gave birth to a stranger’s baby.

Krystena Murray realized the error after the baby's birth because she and her sperm donor were both white and the child was Black. Murray said she wanted to raise the baby but voluntarily gave the 5-month-old to his biological parents after she was told she would not win a legal fight for his custody.

In Australia, each state makes its own laws and rules governing the use of IVF, which advocates say puts patients at risk of error or oversight failings. Queensland’s parliament passed its first laws regulating the sector in 2024.

The measures will establish a registry for all people conceived at a clinic and made the destruction of donors’ medical histories illegal. The change followed an official report that lambasted the storage of frozen sperm donations in Queensland, finding nearly half of samples checked were at medium or high risk of misidentification and recommending thousands be destroyed.

Australia’s states and territories “need to see if their regulations are up to scratch,” the Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth told the Today news program Friday.

“Confidence needs to be brought back and it’s imperative that happens.”

This image from video shows an exterior view of the Monash IVF clinic in Brisbane, Australia, Friday, April 11, 2025. (AuBC, CHANNEL 9 via AP)

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — Israel’s air force struck near Syria's presidential palace early Friday hours after warning Syrian authorities not to march toward villages inhabited by members of a minority sect in southern Syria.

The strike came after days of clashes between pro-Syrian government gunmen and fighters who belong to the Druze minority sect near the capital, Damascus. The clashes left dozens of people dead or wounded.

Friday's strike was Israel's second on Syria this week, and attacking an area close to the presidential palace appears to send a strong warning to Syria's new leadership that is mostly made up of Islamist groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

On Thursday, Syria's Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat Al-Hijri harshly criticized Syria’s government for what he called an “unjustified genocidal attack” on the minority community.

The Israeli army said that fighter jets struck adjacent to the area of the Palace of President Hussein al-Sharaa in Damascus. Its statement gave no further details.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strike was a message to Syrian leaders. “This is a clear message to the Syrian regime. We will not allow a withdrawal of forces from south of Damascus and any danger to the Druze community,” their joint statement said.

Pro-government Syrian media outlets said the strike hit close to the People’s Palace on a hill overlooking the city.

The clashes broke out around midnight Monday after an audio clip circulated on social media of a man criticizing Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The audio was attributed to a Druze cleric. But cleric Marwan Kiwan said in a video posted on social media that he was not responsible for the audio, which angered many Sunni Muslims.

Syria’s Information Ministry said 11 members of the country’s security forces were killed in two separate attacks, while Britain-based war monitor The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 56 people in Sahnaya and the Druze-majority Damascus suburb of Jaramana were killed in clashes, among them local gunmen and security forces.

The Druze religious sect is a minority group that began as a 10th-century offshoot of Ismailism, a branch of Shiite Islam. More than half of the roughly 1 million Druze worldwide live in Syria, largely in the southern Sweida province and some suburbs of Damascus.

Most of the other Druze live in Lebanon and Israel, including in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed in 1981.

Syria's security forces are deployed at a highway where they found bodies of Syrian Druze fighters who were in a convoy heading from the southern Sweida province towards the capital, at al-Sor al-Kobra village near the Sweida town, southern Syria, Thursday, May 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Albam)