Couple Gives Birth To Someone Else's Child After A Mix-Up At Fertility Clinic

Daphna Cardinale and her husband Alexander were over the moon when she gave birth to their baby in late 2019, but from the moment she arrived, they couldn't shake off the suspicion that the child was not theirs, because the baby had a darker complexion than them.

"It was sort of a primal reaction," Alexander, 41, told exclusively to PEOPLE, about how they felt. In fact, he knew something wasn't right from the minute his wife delivered the baby. "It was a little jarring, but I shook it off and cut the umbilical cord," he says.

Daphna tried to convince Alexander that the baby was, in fact, theirs, despite the fact that she looked different. "But she felt so familiar to me because I carried her and I birthed her," the mother said, according to the outlet.

Friends and family too had started noticing the same about the baby, however, the little one had soon found a place in the hearts of the Cardinale couple.

"She just really folded into our lives and into our hearts," said Daphna, 43.

A month after the birth, a staff member from the IVF clinic called them to request a photo of the girl. "It seemed odd," recalls Alexander, a musician. "I thought, 'Do they know something we don't know?'"

The call from the fertility clinic had opened a can of worms for the couple and Dapha decided to put an end to all speculations by getting herself a DNA test kit. And the new parents were absolutely shocked by the results.

"We got an email that basically said that she was genetically related to neither of us," recalled Alexander. "That's when our world started falling apart." While the couple was afraid of losing their little girl, they were also worried that their real child was out there, waiting to be found.

Three months later, they found out that the IVF clinic had mistakenly implanted another couple's embryo into Daphna and transferred the Cardinales' embryo — made from Daphna's egg and Alexander's sperm — into the other woman.

Finding out that the baby they had loved and accepted as their own wasn't actually theirs was a rather traumatic experience for them, which is why they decided to sue the clinic and its owner—LA-based California Center for Reproductive Health and Dr. Eliran Mor—for medical malpractice, negligence, and fraud, among other things.

They also located the couple that gave birth to their baby and confirmed it with a DNA test on Christmas Eve of the same year. And by January 2020, both sets of parents realized that it was time for them to spend the rest of their lives with their biological babies.

Though it's been around two years since this traumatic incident, they're all getting along really well with their children and with each other.

"There's no book for this," Alexander told the publication. "There's no person to give you advice. So we ended up just sort of huddling together, the four of us, and it's a blessing that we all are on the same page. We've spent every holiday together since then. We've spent every birthday together since then — and we've just kind of blended the families."