Thirty-year-old IVF mix-up revealed in Australia

An IVF mix-up resulted in a woman giving birth to twins not genetically related to her – a mistake only discovered 30 years later.

In 1995, Penelope Szafranski underwent her final round of IVF at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Due to a clinic error, she received two embryos from another couple. One of her daughters, Sasha, discovered the mix-up last year after submitting a DNA sample to the genealogy website Ancestry.com. She found that neither of her parents were genetically related to her. Further testing helped her identify her biological parents and a younger biological sister, none of whom were aware of the error.

'I just want to bury my head in the sand and pretend it's not happening,' Penelope told ABC News, before adding: 'The mistake that happened 30 years ago, it is just our life now. We just have to go on with it somehow and it's awful.' She spoke of her powerlessness to undo the situation for her daughters, and of the feeling that 'their identity has been taken.'

Sasha initially thought the DNA results were in error. However, after contacting a woman identified as her aunt through the website, she learned that her biological mother had been undergoing IVF at the same hospital as Penelope, and during the same period. Further DNA testing confirmed the connection.

Both families have now hired lawyers and are pursuing legal action to determine who should be held responsible for the error.

According to the Northern Sydney Local Health District, the hospital's fertility unit was transferred to a private company, North Shore ART, eight months before the embryo transfers took place. The clinic changed ownership several times and is now operated by Virtus Health, which does not accept legal liability because the incident occurred before its ownership.

Several IVF embryo mix-ups have come to light in Australia in recent years, including in 2023, when the wrong embryo was transferred into a patient, resulting in the birth of a child with no genetic link to the mother (see BioNews 1285), and in 2025, when a patient's own embryo was transferred instead of her partner's (see BioNews 1293).

Lucy Lines, an IVF patient advocate and former embryologist, told ABC News that the rise of genealogy websites means 'we are going to uncover more and more situations where people don't have the parentage that they thought they did'. While Lines supports transparency, she cautioned that patients should 'deeply consider what information you might want, and what the impact of having that information might be on your current life.'