Man wins £39,000 in IVF baby deception case

A man has won damages of £39,000 from his ex wife for being led into believing a child conceived through IVF was his. In an unprecedented decision made on 20^th March the Judge at the Central London County Court ordered the ex wife to pay compensation for the “distress and humiliation” suffered by the man.

The parties married in 2002 and in 2004 travelled to an IVF clinic in Barcelona where the man gave a sperm sample. A few months later the woman took a former boyfriend to the same clinic and he also gave a sample. An embryo was created using the other man’s sperm resulting in a baby boy being born in 2005. The man looked after his then wife during the pregnancy and brought the child up as his own. They separated when the boy was a few months old and later divorced.

The man paid child maintenance and, for a time, looked after the child when the woman went back to work. The truth came out in 2011 during a dispute about the amount of time the man spent with the child.

This case was dealt with by the civil, not the family court. The claim was for compensation for a wrong suffered, known in legal language as a “tort”.

After the hearing the man revealed in that in a separate case in the family court a final decision had been made that he can no longer see the child. Decisions of the family court are confidential and even if they are published they must be anonymised to protect the identity of the child. We will never learn the reason a family court thought it was in the child’s best interests for the man in this case not to have any form of relationship with the child.

The law does allow anyone who has a close link to a child to make an application for what is now called a “child arrangements order”. In such applications, most commonly made by grandparents and former step–parents, there is usually an additional step in the proceedings. This is known as obtaining the “leave” (permission) of the court to make the application. The test for obtaining leave is that the applicant must demonstrate a close connection to the child and it is in the child’s best interests for the application to be allowed to proceed.

The fact that this man decided to sue his ex wife is certainly a development in the law and could lead to similar cases being brought. For a child and a father to be misled about parentage can have deep psychological and emotional consequences which cannot be remedied by financial compensation.