The moment Alexander Cardinale laid eyes on his newborn daughter — seconds after his wife Daphna gave birth — he knew something was wrong.
“It was sort of a primal reaction,” Alexander, 41, tells PEOPLE.
“It was a little jarring, but I shook it off and cut the umbilical cord,” he says.
Three months later, the couple learned the shocking reason why: The fertility clinic where Alexander and Daphna had gone for in vitro fertilization (IVF) 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, the Cardinales claim.
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Both couples unwittingly raised the others' child for nearly three months before learning the disturbing truth about what happened, according to the Cardinales.
“This is something that’s just changed who we are,” says a still-shellshocked Daphna, 43, who literally swapped babies with the other couple in January 2020, nearly four months after both infants were born. “It’s still a daily struggle and will continue to be.”
Daphna and Alexander Cardinale.courtesy Alexander and Daphna Cardinale
“People make mistakes,” says the couple’s attorney, Adam Wolf, “and in most industries those mistakes are fairly harmless. They can be corrected. With fertility clinics, those mistakes can have lifelong consequences. This has fundamentally changed the lives of Daphna and Alexander, as well as their two children.”
The couples' odyssey began shortly after Daphna gave birth. Alexander couldn’t shake the feeling that they were not the little girl’s real parents.
“If we hadn’t done IVF, I would’ve just chalked [the lack of resemblance] up togenetics,” he says. “She just looks how she looks. No big deal. But because we’d done IVF, my brain started going to the dark place.”
But Daphna initially attempted to convince her husband that he was overreacting.
Friends and family members noticed the same thing, increasingly commenting that “she looked like she could actually be a different ethnicity than us because she didn’t really look like us,” adds Daphna.
“It was this moment of sheer bliss when everybody is getting to know each other and falling in love with each other,” says Daphna, a therapist. “She just really folded into our lives and into our hearts.”
“It seemed odd,” recalls Alexander, a musician. “I thought, ‘Do they know something we don’t know?’ "
“We got an email that basically said that she was genetically related to neither of us,” recalls Alexander. “That’s when our world started falling apart.”
The couple says they were terrified that they were going to lose the little girl whom they’d grown to love, and at the same time, they were equally afraid that they might have a biological child who was alive and needed to be found.
Alexander Cardinale holding his biological child.courtesy Alexander and Daphna Cardinale
In December 2019, the two couples and their babies underwent DNA testing, and on Christmas Eve, they received the news that the tests revealed that they had given birth to each other’s children, the Cardinales tell PEOPLE. The next day, their attorney sent Alexander a text with a photograph of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter.
“I found out in that moment that she existed, what she looked like and what her name was,” says Alexander, who learned the other couple had named their daughter Zoë, which the Cardinales decided to continue calling her. “It’s weird learning the name of your child when you didn’t name her.”
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Nearly two years have passed since the two couples — who live 10 minutes from each other — got their children back. In that time, they’ve forged a strong bond with one another.
“There’s no book for this,” says Alexander. “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.”
source: people.com
