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I'm a white woman born into a biracial family due to an IVF mix-up - my childhood was a lie
A white woman in Canada has revealed how an IVF mix-up in the 1990s left her as an outsider in her biracial family.
Hadeya Okeafor’s mother is white and her father is black. She had been told much of her life that she was ‘pink like mommy’ and her siblings were ‘brown like daddy’.
She didn’t question the difference growing up, and felt as loved by her family as any sibling, even visiting cousins in Ghana.
She said: ‘You know, kind of like dogs how you can have a white and a black dog in the same litter.
‘At around 11 or 12 they did end up telling me.’
Rather than her dad's sperm being used to fertilize an egg, doctors did so with sperm from a white brunette stranger.
Ms Okeafor visited Ghana with her family to visit cousins there. She is pictured here with one of her cousins
Hadeya Okeafor detailed in a new TikTok the IVF mixup that meant her black father's sperm was not used to fertilize her white mother's egg, leaving her looking very different from her siblings
When her parents confronted the clinic in Toronto about what they believed was the latest in a series of similar mistakes, they were told that it would take up to a year for Hadeya to become darker-skinned.
When it became clear that Dr Khamsi had made a mistake, Ms Okeafor’s mother sued the practice and won.
The process of in vitro fertilization involves using eggs and sperm from a couple or those from donors.
It’s a process in which eggs retrieved from the woman’s ovaries are fertilized outside of the womb using sperm samples and implanted in the woman’s uterus.
Doctors perform around 4,000 IVF cycles each year in the US and over 2million globally.
While an exact number is hard to pin down, these mix-ups are believed to be rare, though exact figures are hard to pine down and could be higher than thought.
Errors and accidents often go unreported in the industry, which is largely self-policed.
In one of the few studies into IVF mistakes, researchers found that Boston IVF, a large chain of fertility clinics, reported mistakes in 0.23 percent, or around one in 400 cases.
Dr Firouz Khamsi at the Toronto Fertility Institute fertilized the egg with sperm from a white brunette man
Ms Okeafor is pictured with her siblings. She said the mix up has never affected her relationship with her siblings, which is strong to this day
She is pictured here again with some of her siblings. She first found out about the mixup when she was around 12, but said she let it roll off her back, choosing to love her family and her place in it as they are
The male donor in Ms Okeafor’s case was a tall white man with brown hair.
‘When my parents had a meeting to discuss with Dr Khamsi, he simply said, you should be thankful what you have, you have a beautiful family, you got what you wanted. Take me to court if you like but that’s what insurance is for.’
Dr Firouz Khamsi owned the Toronto Fertility Institute, which he advertised as Canada’s first free-standing fertility clinic dating back to 1984.
He had problems with staff in the past. Despite a disciplinary board eventually finding him in compliance with care standards, a patient of his had become dissatisfied with his bedside manner and failure to explain that IVF was not always successful. In fact at the time, the chance of success was less than 10 percent.
She complained about him in 1994, and an independent specialist who concluded that Dr. Khamsi's care had fallen short in the initial history and physical, the tests on which he based his diagnosis, his records of discussions with the patient, and emotional support for the patient.
Ms Okeafor has not let the IVF error dictate her life or her relationship with her family, which is and has always been strong. She showed photos of her siblings and father in a new TikTok video, including shots of all of them together looking very close.