When Tiffany Score and Steven Mills went to the hospital to give birth in April 2025, they prepared as most parents do for the joy-filled experience of having no idea what they were doing and loving every minute of it. This Florida couple, however, experienced a surprise they never could have imagined. At birth, the Caucasian couple welcomed a little girl with distinctly non-Caucasian features. Genetic testing confirmed their suspicion: this child was not biologically their own.

Five years earlier, the couple used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to create three human embryos from Tiffany’s eggs and Steven’s sperm. They stored their frozen embryos in a Florida fertility clinic. By the time the couple returned to implant their first embryonic child, the clinic mixed up their embryos and implanted another couple’s embryonic child instead.

As their daughter nears her first birthday, the couple’s lawsuit has begun to make headlines as they seek to find their daughter’s biological parents and discover the fate of their three embryos.

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This “switched at implantation” story reveals the dirty underbelly of the fertility industry: Biology only matters when the contract says it does. As Them Before Us President Katy Faust pointed out on X, “Adults routinely take home unrelated IVF babies and no one objects because that’s what the adults intended. It’s only a ‘problem’ when the adults don’t get the baby they ordered. But for the child, biology always matters.”

The industry operates on the principle that biology only matters when adults want it to matter. One major feature of the fertility industry is the ability of anyone, for any reason, to buy or sell eggs, sperm, and human embryos or rent another woman’s womb in surrogacy in the pursuit of a child. The industry routinely and intentionally creates children and removes them from their biological and gestational parents, and this is considered good if that was the goal. But if it happens without parental consent, it becomes a lawsuit. As Katy Faust notes, it is adult desire and not the best interests of the child that governs the fertility industry.

The question remains: Who has the legal right to this little girl? Is it the family who carried and welcomed her into the world? Is it her biological parents? Who has rights to this couples’ human embryos, if they were implanted and born to another family over the last five years?

The couple’s options are grim. As the New York Post reported, the couple has already sent a letter to the clinic “demanding it unite the baby ‘with her genetic parents’ and explain what happened to his clients’ embryos. … Though they are willing to raise the child themselves, the couple feels a legal and moral obligation to unite the baby with her genetic parents.” Whatever happens, this little girl lives with the knowledge that her birth was in error, a violation of someone else’s contract, and the source of a lawsuit from parents who do not ultimately consider her their own.

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Unlike in adoption, foster care, or divorce settlements, no one conducts a “best interest of the child assessment” for children created via IVF. This is because in the United States, the law treats human embryos as mere property of the clinic, adult, or parents who own them. It’s not until they are born and something goes very wrong, as it did in this case, that the law considers what is best for the child.

The truth the industry refuses to acknowledge is that biology always matters. Children have a natural right and desire to be raised by their biological mother and father. When this is denied, either by accident or through the purchase of egg, sperm, embryos, or wombs, it is the children who pay the price. Indeed, there are many studies of donor-conceived persons that report psychological distress related to their conception, including concerns about not knowing their biological parents or closely related family members, the commercialization of their creation, and the intentional severing of biological ties. In particular, children conceived through sperm donation experience higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and delinquency compared to peers raised by their biological parents.

The Score-Mills case is not an anomaly. It is the fertility industry showing its true face. When the adult contract is honored, no one objects to a child being raised by genetic strangers. When the adult contract is violated, lawyers get involved. But in this case, the child’s loss is the same either way. Until we stop treating children as contractual agreements and human embryos as mere property, these tragedies will continue. The question is not whether fertility clinics can improve their protocols. They can, and they should. The real question is whether we will continue to turn a blind eye to an industry that routinely creates children with the express intention of undermining their ties with their biological and gestational parents.