White couple has black twins

A WHITE couple has had black twins after a mix-up at a British fertility clinic.

The couple, who have not been named, went to the fertility clinic for IVF treatment after trying unsuccessfully for years to have a child, it was reported.

During the process, sperm provided by the man and eggs from the woman are mixed in a laboratory, then placed into the woman to develop.

The white couple noticed something was wrong when the babies were born and were clearly dark-skinned.

The blunder could have been caused by the clinic using a black man’s sperm to fertilise the white woman’s egg, or by the clinic implanting a black couple’s fertilised egg into the white woman.

A source at the NHS Trust in question, which cannot be named, said: “Great steps have been taken to ensure that this sort of thing never happens.

“It must be a one-in-a-million chance,’’ they said.

“The big problem now is, who are the real parents of the twins?”

The IVF blunder looks certain to lead to a court battle over who are the twins’ legal parents.

A High Court injunction has been issued to prohibit identification of the parents, the babies, the name of the clinic or the fertility treatment involved, and the name of the NHS Trust involved.

IVF, or in vitro fertilisation, is used by about 27,000 couples a year in Britain.

Britain is not thought to have had such a mix-up before.

Such a mix-up is not thought to have occurred before in Britain, but an American mother, Donna Fasano, of New York, gave birth to another couple’s baby in 1998.

Ms Fasano, who is white, gave birth to a black child and a judge ordered that she should hand the infant over to his biological parents.

In Holland, Wilma Stuart, who is white, gave birth to dark-skinned twins in 1993.

DNA tests showed the hospital had mistakenly mixed sperm from her husband with that of a black man from the Dutch Antilles. She kept the twins.

A British Medical Association spokeswoman said the case was “a tragedy”, as well as a “nightmare” for the courts.