After undergoing IVF an Israeli woman has given birth to a child which is not biologically related to her or to her husband. She was 30 weeks pregnant when the mistake was discovered The Health Ministry has given up trying to discover who the real parents are. The couple said that they will take responsibility for raising the child.

A long investigation at the clinic, Assuta Medical Center, has proved fruitless. The Haaretz newspaper was told that the error could have happened at a number of points in the sequence of events in the IVF process.

An unidentified manager at Assuta told the media that “a certain percentage of women who carry a pregnancy that is not theirs or give birth to a child that is not exactly theirs”. The manager claimed that mistakes like this happened in “all labs” in Israel, the Times of Israel reported. “You haven’t heard about these stories simply because they haven’t surfaced. A couple who undergoes treatment and has a child is not going to check for genetic affiliation,” the manager said.

Assuta categorically denied the manager’s alarming claim.

Prof. Joshua Shemer, chair of the Assuta Medical Centers group, said a “tragic error” had occurred, but it was almost impossible to find the biological parents.

“There are multiple procedures – fertilization, freezing, thawing and implanting,” he said. “Each is monitored and supervised. But embryos could also be frozen for 20 years.”