Any family who has dealt with infertility will attest it can be a heartbreaking journey. Sometimes, it can take years to conceive, and many seek expensive fertility treatments to help. Even then, it doesn’t happen for everyone. For those lucky families, seeing their baby’s face for the first time truly feels like a miracle. Tiffany Score and Steven Mills felt that heartache firsthand and turned to Fertility Center of Orlando, Florida, run by IVF Life Inc., for help. Lucky for them, their treatments worked, and Score gave birth to their gorgeous daughter, Shea, in December 2025. There was just one problem: Score and Mills are white and their baby is not. The family has filed suit against the fertility clinic and wants answers about how the mix-up occurred.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that Score and Mills worked with IVF Life in 2020 to create and freeze their embryos. It’s not hard to see from Shea that she’s most likely not biologically related to her white parents. That’s not the couple’s only concern. They want to know what the heck happened to the three embryos the clinic claimed it successfully created six years ago.
Jack Scarola, one of the lawyers representing Score and Mills, said Score gave birth to Shea on December 11. The couple adore their baby girl and feel so blessed, but that doesn’t excuse the extremely concerning error the clinic allegedly made.
“They have fallen in love with this child,” Scarola told the Sentinel. “They would be thrilled in the knowledge that they could raise this child. But their concern is that this is someone else’s child, and someone could show up at any time and claim the baby and take that baby away from them.”
In addition, Score and Mills feel a moral duty to share their story with other patients. According to their lawsuit, the couple wants IVF Life to produce a full report on the status of their embryos. They also want genetic testing performed on every baby born under the clinic’s care for the last five years. It’s a tall request but not really unreasonable.
Scarola said the couple filed the lawsuit on January 22, 2026, after multiple attempts to speak with IVF Life went unanswered. The company reportedly had a post on its website stating it was “actively cooperating with an investigation to support one of our patients in determining the source of an error that resulted in the birth of a child who is not genetically related to them.” But the post is no longer there, the Sentinel reported.
Representatives from both sides met before Circuit Court Judge Margaret Schreiber for an emergency hearing and agreed they hope to settle the case quickly.
“There’s not a lot of Florida law for you all to reach a resolution that will provide the answers that the plaintiffs in this case are seeking, and the protections that the defendants want to ensure remain in place for their clients,” Schreiber said during the hearing, per the newspaper.
Alexa Score, Tiffany Score’s sister, created a GoFundMe campaign to help the family during this nightmare. She explained that despite the heartache, the couple loves Shea above all else.
“Baby’s well-being has been and will continue to be Tiff and Steve’s priority,” she wrote on the page. “She spends her days nestled in a warm, nurturing environment thanks to the love of her parents and the beautiful and thoughtful gifts they were showered with before and after her birth.”
This story makes us sad and concerned at the same time. If IVF Life mixed up an embryo once, how many other families like this could be out there? And what happens to those babies? No parent should have to go through the devastation of infertility and then have to question their baby’s identity. Hopefully, they get to the bottom of this case soon and learn the mix-up was an anomaly and not the company’s standard of care.
