When IVF Goes Wrong: India Needs Better Safeguards Against Embryo Mix-Ups

But recent cases have shown a darker side of this technology. Reports have surfaced of babies born through IVF who turn out to have no biological link to the parents who raised them. Somewhere along the way, in a lab, an embryo was switched, a sample was mislabelled, or a simple administrative error was made. The result is not a minor inconvenience. It is a life-altering event for everyone involved.

These are not simple mistakes. They are devastating for everyone involved. Imagine waiting years to become a parent, going through painful injections, repeated failed cycles, and the emotional rollercoaster that comes with infertility treatment. Imagine finally holding your baby after all that struggle, only to learn months or years later that the child is not biologically yours. Somewhere, another family may be raising your biological child without even knowing it. This is not just a medical error. It is a wound that cuts deep into a family's sense of identity, belonging, and trust in the medical system.

What Counts as a Parent?

These mix-ups also raise a question that doctors, lawyers, and philosophers have struggled to answer for years: what actually makes someone a parent? Is it the genes, passed down through DNA, that link a child to its biological mother and father? Is it the nine months a woman carries a pregnancy, feeling the baby grow and move inside her, going through labour, and bonding with the child before it is even born? Or is it simply the love, care, and intention to raise a child as your own, regardless of biology?

There is no easy answer to this question, and that is precisely the problem. Indian law currently has very little to say about it. Most of our legal framework around parentage was written with the assumption that biology, marriage, and birth would line up neatly. Embryo mix-ups break that assumption completely. When a surrogate carries a child that turns out to be unrelated to either intended parent, or when two couples discover their embryos were swapped at the same clinic, the law has no clear answer about who the legal parents are, and whose name should appear on the birth certificate.

A Legal Vacuum

This is where the problem gets worse. India does have two laws meant to regulate this field: the Assisted Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021, and the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021. Both were a genuinely good first step. For years before these laws existed, India's fertility industry operated almost like the Wild West, with clinics opening and shutting with little scrutiny, and almost no central record of how many existed or how they functioned. The 2021 laws brought in registration requirements, set up National and State Boards to oversee the sector, and tried to bring some basic order to an industry that had grown rapidly with very little oversight.

But neither law tells us what should happen when an embryo mix-up actually occurs. They are largely concerned with who is allowed to access ART and surrogacy services, how clinics should be registered, and what records they must keep. Once a mix-up happens, the laws fall silent. Who gets custody of the child? What about the right of inheritance if the biological parents are wealthy and the gestational or intended parents are not? What compensation, if any, is owed to the families who suffer this trauma? Should the clinic's licence be revoked immediately, or should there be a process first? None of these questions are answered in black and white. Families are left to fight it out in courts that have very little legal framework to guide them, often relying on judges to improvise solutions based on whatever precedent, however distantly related, they can find.

This legal vacuum is especially troubling because the stakes here are not abstract. They involve a child's identity, a family's right to know the truth, and decades of emotional and financial investment by parents who did everything right and were still let down by the system meant to help them.

The Ethics of Trust

There is also an ethical side to this story that gets less attention than the legal one. When a couple walks into a fertility clinic, they are placing enormous trust in the doctors and lab staff handling their eggs, sperm, and embryos. They hand over some of the most intimate biological material a person can give, fully expecting that trained professionals will handle it with the highest possible care. That trust is the foundation of the entire IVF process. Without it, the system simply does not work.

When a clinic mishandles an embryo, it breaks that trust, not just for one family, but for everyone considering IVF in the future. Every news story about a mix-up makes the next anxious couple wonder if it could happen to them too. Doctors are bound by a simple, ancient rule that goes back to the earliest days of medical ethics: do good, and do no harm. An embryo mix-up fails on both counts. It does not merely fail to help; it actively causes harm that can never be fully undone. It usually points to sloppy lab practices, missing double-checks at critical moments, overworked staff handling too many samples at once, and clinics that nobody is properly watching.

Learning from Other Countries

Other countries have already learned this lesson the hard way and have tightened their rules in response. In several Western countries, repeated incidents of embryo mix-ups, some decades ago, forced regulators to overhaul how fertility clinics operate. Many clinics abroad now use electronic tracking systems, similar to barcodes used in hospitals for blood transfusions, that flag embryos and samples at every single stage of the process. This makes a mix-up almost impossible to miss, because the system itself will raise an alert if something does not match.

Clinics in many of these countries are also required to have two separate staff members independently verify identity at every critical step, from fertilisation to embryo transfer. This "double witnessing" system means that no single person's mistake can go unnoticed, because someone else is always checking the same step. On top of this, strict liability laws in many jurisdictions mean clinics cannot simply pay their way out of a mistake with a token settlement, without facing real regulatory and legal consequences, including the possible loss of their licence to operate.

India, despite its size and its position as one of the most popular destinations in the world for fertility treatment, has been slow to catch up to these standards. Most clinics still rely heavily on manual labelling and paper or basic digital records, leaving far too much room for human error in an area where there is simply no room for error at all.

What Needs to Change

What India needs now is not just punishment after something goes wrong, but rules that stop it from going wrong in the first place. That means mandatory DNA testing whenever parentage is disputed, so that families do not have to rely on guesswork or assumptions. It means regular surprise audits of fertility clinics, instead of inspections that clinics can prepare for in advance. It means stricter record-keeping so that every embryo can always be traced back to its source, no matter how many years have passed. And it means requiring that clinics carry proper insurance, so that families are not left without any financial recourse simply because a clinic cannot afford to compensate them.

Families who go through this trauma also need more than money. They need counselling to process what is, in every sense, a kind of grief, and they need legal support to help them navigate a system that currently offers them very little clarity. No law can undo the emotional damage of an embryo mix-up, but a good law can make sure families are not left to fight this battle entirely alone.

Biology Is Not Everything, But Choice Matters

At the end of the day, no one is saying biology is everything. Plenty of parents raise children with love and devotion despite having no genetic connection to them at all, through adoption, surrogacy, or donor conception that was always intended from the start. Love and care can absolutely make a family, regardless of what the DNA says.

But that should be a choice families make, openly and knowingly, not something forced on them because a lab made an avoidable error and never told them the truth. The difference between a chosen non-biological family and an unintentional one created by a mix-up is the difference between consent and deception, and that difference matters enormously to the people living through it.

As IVF becomes more common across India, with more couples turning to it every year as a path to parenthood, the laws and safety nets around it need to grow just as fast as the industry itself. Progress in medicine should not just be measured by how many lives science can create, but by how well we protect the dignity, identity, and trust of the people who turn to it for help. Until India closes these gaps, every family that walks into a fertility clinic is placing a little more faith in the system than the system currently deserves.