Woman sues for receiving wrong egg during IVF

Published on Thursday 19 February 2009 21:03

A JAPANESE woman was impregnated with the fertilised egg of another woman by accident during an in vitro procedure last year, hospital officials have said.

The woman, who is in her twenties, aborted the pregnancy when she was told of the mistake at the government-run hospital in Kagawa prefecture, about 330 miles south-west of Tokyo.

She is now suing the local government for 155,000.

Hospital officials apologised for the mistake on Thursday.

"She was very happy after undergoing such a difficult procedure and becoming pregnant, but unfortunately a mistake had been made," said Yuzo Matsumoto, director of the Kagawa Prefectural Central Hospital.

The hospital has a long history of carrying out such procedures, and this is the first time such a mistake has occurred, hospital spokesman Hajime Morishita said.

"The in vitro procedures are carried out in sequence one after the other, and in this case the eggs from one procedure may have accidentally been left over and used in the following procedure," he said.

In vitro procedures – in which a woman's eggs are removed, fertilised outside the womb, and placed in her uterus to cause a pregnancy – are common in Japan, with hundreds of thousands carried out per year. Surrogate births, in which eggs are removed for fertilisation and implanted in another woman, and adoptions are rare in the country.