THE MOTHER OF ALL MIX-UPS

What would you do if a court said your baby wasn’t yours, and took him from your arms? As Genevieve Gannon discovers, this has been the devastating reality for couples caught up in IVF embryo mix-ups

- Genevieve Gannon

On a cold New York day after the usual nine months of nesting and anticipation, Donna Fasano gave birth to two darling boys. She and her husband, Richard, were both in their late 30s and had enlisted an IVF clinic to help them conceive, so when the twins’ cries filled that hospital room in December 1998, there was not only joy, but relief. They named the babies Vincent and Joseph and took them home to Staten Island where the little ones shared bath time and a baby gym, in the way brothers do.

“Both these boys are beautiful – two precious, normal little boys,” the couple’s lawyer, Ivan Tantleff, said in the wake of the catastrophe that unfolded, though it would have been hard for the parents to deny knowing something was amiss.

On May 10, 1999, when the babies were five months old, Donna and Richard separated their twins, said a tearful goodbye to Joseph, and handed him over to two strangers. “We’re giving him up because we love him,” Donna explained at the time. It was heartbreaking but they didn’t have a choice because, despite the fact that Donna had given birth to him, Joseph had no biological relationship to Donna, Richard or his “twin brother”, Vincent. In fact, the Fasanos were white and Joseph, or Akeil as he was renamed, was African American.

The error that led to this nightmare situation was revealed in an ugly court battle. Akeil’s biological parents, Deborah and Robert Rogers, had attended a Manhattan IVF clinic on the same day as the Fasanos, but unlike the Fasanos, their procedure had not resulted in a pregnancy. What Deborah and Robert didn’t then know was that their embryo had been inadvertently implanted in Donna’s womb.