A 6-month-old baby girl conceived via in vitro fertilization and accidentally implanted in the wrong womb will be raised by the woman who birthed her instead of the biological parents who commissioned her creation, a “mutually devised custody agreement” in Florida determined this week.
The agreement, publicized on June 15, confirmed Steven Mills and Tiffany Score will “continue as the permanent custodial parents” of the unnamed baby girl despite not sharing any of her DNA. The decision comes months after the couple filed a lawsuit against the Fertility Center of Orlando after learning that the child Score gestated for nine months was not their own.
Score and Mills, a white couple who used their own sperm and eggs to commission embryos in 2020, were shocked in December 2025 when Score birthed a baby girl who was “100 percent South Asian.”
“Tragically, while both JANE DOE AND JOHN DOE are racially Caucasian, Baby Doe displayed the physical appearance of a racially non-Caucasian child,” the couple’s January 2026 lawsuit states.
“Extensive DNA testing” completed by the fertility facility due to the suit confirmed that the baby belonged to an unnamed client who was the Fertility Center of Orlando’s “only other patient in March 2020, when Score and Mills had embryos created and frozen.”
By then, Mills and Score had not only birthed and cared for the baby girl for months, but they had also bonded with her.
“Only one thing is as absolutely certain as it was on the day our daughter was born: We will love and will be this child’s parents forever,” they wrote in a statement.
After some deliberation, Mills, Score, and the baby’s biological parents reached a “mutually devised custody agreement” that confirmed Mills and Score would raise the child as their own.
“I’m glad the parties have reached an agreement while this child is relatively young,” 9th Circuit Judge Margaret Schreiber declared.
Despite the judge’s optimism that the baby escaped the harm of a years-long custody battle, there was never a good solution here.
Separating the baby girl from Score, the only mother she’s known in the womb and out, to reunite her with her biological mother would likely cause all of the parties involved irrevocable physical, emotional, and mental harm. Allowing Mills and Score to keep the baby girl despite sharing none of her DNA, similarly, would inflict physical, emotional, and educational disadvantages that would not affect her if she were born and raised by her married biological parents.
Litigation against the Fertility Center of Orlando, which reportedly shuttered its doors in May, is ongoing, but as Mills and Score’s initial suit noted, “there is no adequate remedy at law for the ongoing loss, injury and damage” they suffered as a result of this situation. The biggest losers in this situation, however, aren’t Mills and Score or even the baby girl’s genetic parents. The biggest loser is the child, whose life was treated as a commodity that could be implanted or thrown away depending on the will of the adults who commissioned her long before her conception in a lab.
Embryos created via IVF are treated as disposable, and a majority (93 to 97 percent) go unused. Those test tube babies that are not dissected under the guise of research or discarded after notoriously unreliable grading revealed traits deemed less desirable are stored indefinitely in cryopreservation tanks.
For five years, the girl embryo conceived in a lab in 2020 sat in a freezer untouched. It’s unclear if she would have been given a chance at implantation and birth by her biological parents had there not been “laboratory-clinic errors.”
In fact, to this day, Mills and Score’s sole remaining embryo sits in a cryopreservation tank waiting to be implanted. Questions about what happened to their other embryo, which was supposed to be implanted in Score in March 2025, “are still unanswered and are even more unlikely to ever be answered,” the couple wrote in an April 2026 statement.
Media and reproductive technology activists pretend that IVF mixups like this one, serial surrogacy and abuse, IVF-addicted 68-year-olds, pedophiles buying proximity to children, and rent-a-womb racketeering rings are one-offs. On the contrary, the fertility industry enables and even promotes arrangements that inarguably harm children because it is profitable to cater to adults’ desires.
With assisted reproductive technology, anyone and everyone, regardless of their relationship status or sexuality, can buy their way into parenthood regardless of children’s natural rights. The consequences of this commodification include normalized eugenics, forced orphanhood, deliberate ignorance of women’s health solutions, the erasure of women in reproduction, fertility fraud, more than a million indefinitely frozen embryos, millions more discarded embryos, and now IVF custody battles that put babies like the one Mills and Score are raising in impossible and painful situations.
