China mum fears IVF embryo misused after seeing post of missing girl identical to daughter
- With 300,000 test-tube babies born in China each year, incident raises wider concerns about safety of stored embryos
A mother in China who claimed that a missing girl looked uncannily like her test-tube daughter suspected her stored embryos might have been misused.
On August 13, the mother surnamed Wang, who lives in Shanghai, saw a video online in which a blogger had found a lost little girl at a railway station and was trying to locate her parents.
A concerned friend of Wang’s had sent the video to her after noticing the striking resemblance between the girl and Wang’s daughter who was born through in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
“My friend asked if I had lost my child. It completely stunned me,” Wang told Chinese Business View.
“This little girl really looks like my daughter, even her expressions are the same,” she said.
Given that her daughter was born through IVF and additional embryos were stored at the hospital for a potential second child, Wang thought there might have been an error or that her embryos had been misused.