A Florida couple who gave birth to another family’s baby following an IVF mix-up have been granted permanent custody of the girl they have raised since her birth, after a judge approved a custody agreement that will allow them to remain her parents while preserving the rights of her biological family.
Tiffany Score and Steven Mills, who are white, welcomed baby girl Shea, who is black, in December after a different family’s embryo was mistakenly implanted during fertility treatment at the Fertility Center of Orlando. The couple had spent five agonising years trying to conceive before turning to IVF using embryos they had stored since 2020. When Shea was born, the new parents were left searching for answers, and genetic testing subsequently confirmed she had no biological connection to either of them.
At a hearing in Seminole County on Monday, Circuit Court Judge Margaret Schreiber approved a “mutually devised custody agreement” allowing the couple to “continue as the permanent custodial parents of their daughter,” according to the Orlando Sentinel. The judge said: “I’m glad the parties have reached an agreement while this child is relatively young.”
The couple, who sued the fertility clinic after the error came to light, had described finding Shea’s biological parents as a “moral obligation” and announced in April that they had been identified through genetic testing. At the time, they said: “This ends one chapter in our heartbreaking journey, but it raises new issues that will have to be resolved. Only one thing is as absolutely certain today as it was on the day our daughter was born — we will love and will be this child’s parents forever.” Following Monday’s ruling, they confirmed they would be protecting the privacy of Shea’s biological parents by keeping their identities confidential.
Despite the heartbreak of discovering the error, the couple say they have developed an “intensely strong emotional bond” with Shea and love her “more than words can express.” Their lawyer Jack Scarola told the Orlando Sentinel in January: “They have fallen in love with this child. They would be thrilled in the knowledge that they could raise this child. But their concern is that this is someone else’s child, and someone could show up at any time and claim the baby and take that baby away from them.”
The case also raised broader concerns about the fate of the couple’s own embryos, which remain unaccounted for, and whether a similar mix-up may have resulted in their biological child being born to another family. The Fertility Center of Orlando announced in April that it was closing, with another clinic due to open in the same facility. The centre had previously said it was cooperating with an investigation “to support one of our parents in determining the source of an error that resulted in the birth of a child who is not genetically related to them.”
