What If My Test-Tube Babies Were Swapped in the Lab?

By Jane Wulf

My heart goes out to Donna Fasano. She's the New York City woman who was reluctantly thrust into the headlines last week because of an infertility treatment mix-up that impregnated her with two embryos: one created by her egg and her husband's sperm, the other by an African-American couple who had been seeing the same specialist at the same time. She carried both embryos to term, giving birth to two beautiful but noticeably different boys and raising them for three months, during which time they shared the same crib, the same swing, the same parents. Then when a black couple came forth claiming to be the biological parents of one of her twins, she faced a truly Solomonic test of love.

The mind reels. Like thousands of women my age, I'm intimately familiar with the emotional roller-coaster ride that is in-vitro fertilization. Four years ago, my husband and I were blessed with our own test-tube babies--beautiful girl twins who are equally delightful but totally different. One looks just like me; the other bears little resemblance. Are they both mine? Were my eggs placed in the right drawer? In the right Petri dish? Fertilized by the right sperm? Is someone else raising one of my children? Is ignorance bliss?

Reproductive medicine has come a long way in a very short time. It is now a $1 billion-a-year industry that accounts for some 23,000 live births a year in the U.S. But its well-publicized mishaps have moral overtones. Are we interfering with the natural order of things, allowing doctors to play God?

For those who choose to play its roulette wheel, baby-making technology is both heart-wrenching and expensive (as much as $18,000 for a procedure). It involves sophisticated drugs that you must inject into yourself daily and whose long-term toll may be yet unknown. But the possible return? A miracle.

Last week Fasano announced she had agreed to surrender custody of her black son to the black couple, pending the final results of a DNA test. A mother was giving up a son whom she had borne and whom she loves; another woman was receiving the gift of life. Two couples who had separately made the decision to undergo the invasive procedures of modern reproductive medicine and place their faith in the hands of all-too-fallible infertility experts are now permanently joined together, their private lives public, their sons forever brothers.

--By Jane Wulf