A woman from Coffs Harbour, Australia, has discovered that she was the result of an IVF mix-up 30 years ago, after a genealogy test revealed she is not biologically related to her parents.
Sasha Szafranski, now 30, took an Ancestry.com test to learn about her father's Polish heritage. Instead, she found she had no genetic link to either parent, and that a wrong embryo had been implanted into her mother, Penelope, during her final round of IVF at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney in 1995.
Initially dismissing it as a website error, Sasha later discovered she had a sister she never knew and an aunt living in the same town. Contacting her aunt online, she asked if she and her twin sister were conceived via IVF. “Then the penny dropped,” Sasha told Australia's ABC 7.30 program.
Penelope was shocked when her daughters broke the news. “They just sort of said, um, there was a mix up, mum, we’re not your biological children. I said, 'What? You know, what are you talking about? I know you are. I was there,'” she recounted. Despite the revelation, Sasha still considers Penelope her mother.
Sasha's biological parents, who were also undergoing IVF at the same hospital and lived in Coffs Harbour, later had another daughter—Sasha's biological sister. Sasha described meeting them as “like walking into a house you’ve never been in, but knowing where the light switches are.”
Both families are considering legal action to uncover how the mix-up occurred. North Shore A.R.T ran the clinic at the time, later taken over by a company now part of Virtus Health. A Virtus Health spokesperson said the company did not own or operate any entity associated with the incident in 1995.
