An Asian-American couple who enlisted a pricey fertility clinic to help them have children is taking legal action, after the woman ultimately gave birth to twins that were not genetically related to her or her husband.

After struggling for years to conceive, the husband and wife –identified in court papers only as Y.Z. and A.P.– sought the services of Los Angeles-based CHA Fertility Center, which bills itself as a “mecca of reproductive medicine,”according to the New York Post.

The couple forked out an estimated $100,000 in total to pay for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process in which the mother’s egg is combined with the father’s sperm outside the body, and the embryo is then transferred to the uterus.

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The procedure was a success, but there were early signs in the pregnancy that something had gone awry. Ultrasound technicians told the mother-to-be that she was carrying twin boys – even though she had directed the CHA center to implant her with two female embryos.

Apparently none the wiser, the fertility clinic reassured the expecting parents that the sonograms were “not a definitive test” and that there was no reason for them to be alarmed.

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But when the wife gave birth via a cesarean section in March, it was clear that something had, indeed, gone terribly wrong. Both babies were boys, and neither shared their parents’ Asian ethnicity. Subsequent tests showed that the newborns were not genetically related to couple – meaning that the woman who had waited for so long to have children of her own had given birth to someone else’s babies.

The pair were then forced to hand over the twin boys to their respective biological parents, who were also clients of CHA.

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Heartbroken and enraged, the unwitting surrogate mother and her husband have lawyered-up and are now suing the fertility clinic.

Seeking unspecified damages, court papers filed in Brooklyn, New York noted that the couple “may never know what happened to their embryos, as well as whether the currently cryo-preserved embryos are genetically matched to them.”

This is not the first scandal to plague fertility clinics. In a recent case that made headlines, a liquid nitrogen freezer tank failed at a fertility center in Cleveland, Ohio, destroying scores of eggs and embryos.

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