A Florida couple who learned they had been given the wrong embryo after their newborn, Shea, appeared to be of a different race, will retain permanent custody of the child.
Steven Mills and Tiffany Score reached a custody agreement with Shea’s biological parents – identified anonymously as Patient 004 – in a court filing last week from their lawsuit against the Florida clinic allegedly responsible for the embryo snafu.
Last year, Mills and Score enlisted the services of the Fertility Center of Orlando to conceive a baby through in-vitro fertilization.
After a healthy pregnancy, Score gave birth to their daughter in December 2025, but the couple, who are both white, suspected something was amiss as their child did not also appear to be white. Subsequent genetic testing confirmed Shea was not biologically related to either Mills or Score.
In January, the couple sought via their lawsuit for the clinic to identify Shea’s biological parents and to also pay for the genetic testing of children born to other patients to determine if one of their original embryos had been subject to another mix-up.
The couple had three embryos stored at the clinic – of which one resulted in a miscarriage, the other was transported to a new facility and the third remains unaccounted for, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
“In the absence of the racial disparity that alerted [Mills and Score] to your inexcusable error, the fact and results of the error might be concealed for years or left undiscovered indefinitely,” wrote Jack Scarola, one of the couple’s attorneys in a 5 January letter addressed to the Fertility Center of Orlando, according to court documents.
According to an amended January complaint, Mills and Score had formed an “intensely strong emotional bond” with Shea and wanted to keep her in their care, but they also recognized their daughter should be “legally and morally united with her genetic parents”.
The details of the custody agreement will remain private, according to last week’s court filing.
Following the controversy, Fertility Center of Orlando shuttered its operations on 20 May, according to an announcement on their website. The company has also faced unrelated legal woes, after being accused of medical malpractice and negligence related to a 2024 surrogate pregnancy, where the infant died soon after birth.
“Questions about the disposition of our own embryos are still unanswered and are even more unlikely to ever be answered,” Mills and Score said in an April statement obtained by the Orlando Sentinel. “Only one thing is as absolutely certain as it was on the day our daughter was born – we will love and be this child’s parents forever.”
