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A West Australian couple who donated their frozen embryos so a Queensland woman could have a baby say they suffered psychiatric injury and grief after discovering an IVF bungle meant the child wasn’t theirs.
Details of the shocking Brisbane embryo mix-up have emerged in a Supreme Court writ filed against Monash IVF by the donors, who were left out of a multimillion-dollar confidential settlement reached with the other families involved.
The negligence claim follows revelations in February 2025 that an error at Monash IVF’s Brisbane clinic – which the court documents claim was in its first day of operation – resulted in the Queensland woman giving birth to a stranger’s baby.
This masthead has chosen not to identify the families involved out of respect for their privacy and to protect the children involved.
The court documents say the WA couple had a child via IVF in 2018, before conceiving naturally and having a daughter in 2020.
The couple decided to donate their four remaining frozen embryos to a suitable couple to parent them and, in September 2022, were introduced to a couple via a Facebook group established for matching potential donors to families in need.
The statement of claim says both couples underwent a counselling session organised by Monash IVF in January 2023 to ensure they understood the donation process, and the WA donors then consented for their embryos to be used by the Brisbane mother and father to be.
The writ claims Monash IVF then organised to transport, store, thaw and transfer the frozen embryos to its Brisbane client.
The Queensland couple then successfully had a baby using Monash IVF, which the WA pair believed was biologically theirs.
The would-be embryo donors say the Brisbane recipients contacted them on February 20, 2025, to let them know there had been a mix-up and the baby wasn’t theirs.
Monash’s then Chief Operating Officer Hamish Hamilton visited the West Australian donors with a psychologist to discuss the incident.
The court documents claim Monash was negligent in not having a safe system for the identification of embryos to be used in a transfer, did not correctly identify the embryo to be used, did not transfer the correct embryo to the recipient mother, and did not conduct a post-transfer audit of the embryos used.
“By engaging in the IVF services, including storing, transporting and transferring the embryos, and facilitating the counselling sessions with the recipient parents, and taking the consent of the plaintiffs to the donation of the embryos to a known recipient couple for the purposes of an embryo transfer, the defendants assumed responsibility for the safe storage, care and transfer of the embryos in accordance with the consent provided,” the document says.
“The First and Second Plaintiffs [the WA couple] were in a position of vulnerability and were dependent on the Defendants to take care of the embryos while the embryos were in their custody and control.”
They claim Monash IVF should have foreseen that the donors would suffer a recognised psychiatric illness if reasonable care were not taken to ensure the correct identification and transfer of embryos.
The WA couple are both suing Monash IVF for damages claiming they have suffered psychiatric injuries including chronic adjustment disorder with depressed and anxious mood and mild to moderate unresolved grief reaction and bereavement process.
The blunder, which Monash IVF later blamed on “human error” was not discovered until about a year after the child was born, when the clinic’s staff noticed a woman had one embryo fewer than had been recorded and eventually realised it had been transferred to the wrong patient.
Monash IVF in March 2025 commissioned Fiona McLeod, SC, to conduct an independent investigation into the Brisbane error as its share price and reputation tumbled.
But within three months, the company had to expand the review after admitting a different woman had been implanted with the wrong embryo during a procedure at its Clayton clinic on June 5.
Some of that review’s findings were made public in August 2025, with Monash stating there were stark differences in the circumstances between the two cases, though human error was at the heart of both.
Monash IVF said the review found that the two incidents were unrelated, different in nature and had occurred years apart. It also found that both involved non-standard IVF treatment and circumstances that would not typically arise in most procedures.
Monash IVF previously declined to speak about the negligence claim, with a spokesperson saying it would not comment on individual cases or matters before the courts.
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