Woman discovers she was swapped as an embryo

Australian woman Sasha Szafranski was researching her paternal heritage through Ancestry.com when she accidentally uncovered a fertility industry mistake that had been hidden for 30 years, and that would rock two families.

Key Takeaways:

• Sasha Szafranski always felt out of place in her family, but nothing could have prepared her for the results of her Ancestry.com testing, which led to the discovery that she was not biologically related to either of her parents.

• In 1995, her mother, Penny, had two embryos transferred to her uterus. She gave birth to Sasha and her twin and raised them.

• After reconnecting with her father, Sasha took an Ancestry DNA test to learn more about his heritage, but the results showed relatives she had never heard of before, including a sister.

• She soon learned that the fertility business had transferred the embryos of another couple, and no one knows what happened to Penny's embryos.

• Sasha said she is suffering emotionally from the news, and that the ongoing litigation makes her life feel reduced to the consequence of an error.

The Backstory:

In 1995, Penny Szafranski and her then-husband decided to take one more shot at having babies using in vitro fertilization (IVF). They had been through IVF before, but it hadn't worked, and Penny had all but "given up."

"If it works, it works and if it doesn't, then I think we're done," she recalled. She underwent an egg retrieval at Hunters Hill Private Hospital in Sydney and went to Royal North Shore Hospital for the embryo transfer. Two embryos were transferred, and both implanted — their daughters, Sasha and Sasha's twin sister.

Penny was thrilled. Soon after the girls were born, she and her husband split, and she became a single mother, moving to Coffs Harbour to be closer to family when the girls were five.

Sasha remembers her childhood fondly, but she also recalls feeling as though she didn't belong within her family.

The Details:

At age 30 and a mother herself, Sasha reconnected with her father. She decided to learn more about his heritage, knowing only that he was born in Poland after World War II.

Sasha used Ancestry DNA, and when the results came in, she expected to see that she was half-Polish. Instead, her results showed she was Irish and English. At first, she assumed that there had been an error at Ancestry, but then a stranger sent her a message that led her on a shocking journey to the truth.

Elizabeth (whose name has been changed) was showing up on Ancestry.com as Sasha's maternal aunt, but they could not figure out how exactly they were connected. Then Elizabeth asked Sasha the question that changed everything:

...you wouldn't happen to be IVF babies by any chance?

Elizabeth's sister had also done IVF, and when she mentioned this to Sasha, Sasha asked Elizabeth about a person in the Ancestry database who was coming up as a full sibling. That person was Elizabeth's niece. They then discovered that Penny and Elizabeth's sister had both used the same IVF facility. But this was Sasha's mother's side of the family. It seemed she was not biologically related to her mother.

"That was the moment when I realised it wasn't an error with Ancestry," said Sasha. Then Elizabeth asked her if she had also matched with a person on the paternal side, and that's when Sasha realized she wasn't biologically related to either of her parents.

Further DNA testing confirmed this, and the results showed a 99.9% chance that the other couple was Sasha and her twin's parents.

Curious, Sasha looked up the name of the woman listed as her full sibling and found a photo of her. "We looked scarily similar," she said. "You would think that this sister and I were twins. I threw up. Yeah, I felt sick. I've not felt dread like this. It was everything at once."

At this point, she still hadn't told Penny. How do you tell your mother that she's not your mother? Sasha and her twin traveled home to tell their mother in person.

A family heartbreak:

"They just sort of said, 'There was a mix-up Mum. We're not your biological children,'" recalled Penny. "I said, 'What? What are you talking about? ... I know you are. I was there." She thought they were joking, but they weren't smiling.

"I gave birth to them, you know," she told ABC. "They were my girls. There was no thought that they weren't. I just want to bury my head in the sand and pretend it's not happening. You know, I can sort of think, 'Oh, I've still got my two kids. Everything's hunky-dory,' but I know it's not."

It is now clear that Sasha and her twin were transferred to Penny in a 24-hour window after their biological mother's egg had been fertilized. It is still unclear how this error happened. None of the institutions involved are accepting the fault, as Royal North Shore Hospital's fertility unit was transferred to a company called North Shore A.R.T. in 1994, just eight months before the embryo mixup, and then North Shore A.R.T. was purchased by Virtus Health in the early 2000s.

As Penny has dealt with her own pain, she sees what this has done to her daughters. "Their identity has been taken," she said. "They're not who they thought they were and they're struggling. That is so hard to see because... you can't change it for them. I can't make it different. I can't press a button and make it rewind everything."

Meeting a new family:

For years, strangers have thought they knew Sasha, and she assumed it was because of the twin she grew up with; now, she believes it's because her biological family also lived in Coffs Harbour, and they had all unknowingly been living in the same community for years.

After connecting with her biological family, Sasha brought her two children to meet her biological parents. "I'm in the driveway, they open the door and I saw the father, it's just my face," she said. "That's my face, probably a bit sun-kissed, but that's how I am gonna look in 20 or so years." Her biological mother, meanwhile, looked remarkably like Sasha's twin. "Looking at her and seeing so much of my sister and just the mannerisms — the mannerisms were similar."

She explained that there was an awkwardness in that first meeting, but also a connection. She noted, "My son got out of the car and he just put his arms out straight to my biological father, like they've known each other forever. I can't speak to what happened there — kids are kids — but I don't know. It seems too connected to be coincidence."

She also learned that her love of surfing comes from her biological family, and she is beginning to learn more about herself and why she always felt out of place as a child.

"It's like walking into a house you've never been in but knowing where all the light switches are. Like, I know how to talk to these people but, because it's still so fresh, there's all this grief," she said.

What's Happening Now:

Both families have hired lawyers to investigate the situation, with little progress. Penny has no idea what happened to her embryos. "I wonder all the time, like how did this happen? Was I put in the wrong room?" she said. "I am assuming [my embryos] went to the other couple... I just don't know."

Sasha's biological parents, however, did not become pregnant when Penny did. Their daughter was born years later and is biologically theirs.

Sasha has left the litigation because it caused her too much pain and stress. She felt as though her life were being diminished:

Just getting reduced again to being the consequence of the error, reduced to being the embryo, it held too much moral injury for me. I just felt bad all of the time.

Even if some kind of justice is served, the emotional turmoil will still exist for these families. "I don't really want money, I don't really want revenge, I just want reform," Sasha said. She knows that there are likely more families out there who have no idea they aren't biologically related to each other, or parents who don't know they have biological children in the world, as her biological parents didn't. She wants justice for all of them.

"I think Mum deserves that," she said, "I think the other family deserves that."

Sasha also wants to prevent this from happening again in the future and wants politicians and regulators to enact stricter regulations and change. "I want them to see the stakes of what happens when there's a mistake," she said. "If you have the ability to create life, you should have the ability to put it in the right person."

The Bottom Line:

Embryo mixups and sperm and egg swaps are a problem that is plaguing the fertility industry. The onset of DNA kits is exposing decades-old secrets, and families with young children are being torn in two trying to do what's best for everyone. Sasha and her family are not alone — not even close. All over the world — New York, Israel, Australia, Utah, and California — families are facing this serious, life-altering issue that they never expected.