One couple said they had immediate suspicions that the girl she gave birth to in late 2019 was not theirs, due to the child's darker complexion.

However, they fell in love with the baby and trusted the in vitro fertilisation process and their doctors - only to find they has another couple's baby. The other mother gave birth to her child - also a daughter and she and her husband took her home.

"I was overwhelmed by feelings of fear, betrayal, anger and heartbreak," said one of the mothers.

"I was robbed of the ability to carry my own child. I never had the opportunity to grow and bond with her during pregnancy, to feel her kick."

She and her husband, who have filed the lawsuit, are accusing the California Center for Reproductive Health (CCRH) and its owner, Dr Eliran Mor, of medical malpractice, breach of contract, negligence and fraud. It demands a jury trial and seeks unspecified damages.

The two other parents involved in the alleged mix-up plan a similar lawsuit in the coming days, according to the attorney representing all four parents.

The girls were born a week apart in September 2019. Both couples unwittingly raised the wrong child for nearly three months before DNA tests confirmed that the embryos were swapped, according to the filing.

They were swapped back in January 2020.

The couples' lawyer, whose firm specialises in fertility cases, is calling for greater oversight for IVF clinics. "This case highlights an industry in desperate need of federal regulation," he says.

Breaking the news to their older daughter, now seven, that doctors made a mistake and that the baby was not actually her sister "was the hardest thing in my life," one of the affected parents says.

"My heart breaks for her, perhaps the most."

Since the mix-up came to light and the babies returned to their biological families, all four parents have made an effort to stay in each others' lives and "forge a larger family,".

Source

• The Guardian
• Image: The Today Show

One offers to track my ovulation and get me pregnant.

The other offers to do the same, but promising I won't find myself in the family way.

The latter seems to be winning the war, with quirky gifs and videos showing young women waking up and gleefully taking their temperature, inputting digits into their colourful app, and being told they can throw barrier contraception to the wind that day.

It's sold as being hyper-scientific, with the founders and developers formerly working at Cern, and "without a single side-effect": unless, of course you count unintended pregnancy as a side-effect.

The novelist Olivia Sudjic, writing for the Guardian, revealed her shock at getting pregnant within months of starting to use the Natural Cycles app, and found many other women had too.

In bare bones, the app is simply the Vatican-favoured rhythm method repackaged in shiny, Silicon Valley jargon and a slick interface.

And the rhythm method doesn't have the greatest reputation as a diecast means of preventing pregnancy: the Catholic church recommend it for married couples both trying to plan and delay pregnancy, but with the very clear message that couples employing it should be open to the possibility of new life.

Happy accidents can bring as much joy as planned babies - as a Catholic, I back the church's teaching that sex is about far more than pleasure, and also comes with responsibility and consequences for you and your family.

I could use the app to try to avoid pregnancy but would have to accept pregnancy as a possible outcome of any bedroom antics.

But other women are perfectly entitled to want a contraceptive less prone to chance and failure, and deserve the truth about the app sold as super accurate.

It's unreliable because our bodies are unreliable: fertility waxes and wanes with an assortment of biological factors, and tracking ovulation is never an exact science.

It's this fact that makes the marketing behind Natural Cycles so insidious: the science is pushed hard even though the founders are physicists, not gynaecologists.

I'd no more listen to a physicist's advice on my fertility than I would let a mechanic cut my hair.

To use the app correctly, women must record their temperature at the same time each morning, immediately upon waking, before sitting up.

Many things can throw off the accuracy: oversleeping, having a fever, being hung over, insomnia, taking your temperature shortly after waking, irregular periods and polycystic ovary syndrome.

According to these criteria I couldn't have recorded a single day accurately in the last week - I've had heat-induced insomnia, slept late, woken early, had a mild hangover, and woke one morning with a slight fever.

Trying to remember all of these conditions, when the app's marketing tells you it is reliable, gives some clue as to the reason why so many women are unhappy.

But it's not surprising that promises of natural birth control are so alluring.

The side-effects of most forms of contraception are maddening.

Friends on the pill have had their weight explode, their mental health suffer, and their skin return to teenage form, with migraines drastically worsened by daily hormones. Continue reading

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist who writes on politics, social affairs and economics
• Image: Inside Housing

The Women on Web site has a long history of helping those in countries where abortion is illegal obtain pills to terminate early pregnancies.

An online consultation with a doctor is involved.

A woman is told where she can get the pills locally that will bring about an abortion or, if necessary, the pills will be sent to her.

Revelations about the scale of the demand were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Guardian reported.

The researchers analysed data for 19 Latin American countries.

They compared the numbers of requests there with three countries - Chile, Poland and Uruguay - where there have been no health warnings about the dangers of Zika virus in pregnancy.

"There is a huge surge," said Dr Catherine Aiken from the University of Cambridge.

"It's over 100 per cent increase in demand in some of the countries we looked at - almost 110 per cent increase in Brazil."

In those countries with no Zika outbreak, there was no such rise in demand.

In a supplement to the study, the researchers have published some of the emails to Women on Web which reveal their fears.

"I need to do an abortion because of the great risk of infection with Zika here . . . Please help me. My economic situation is extremely difficult," said one woman in Brazil.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation advised people in countries where the Zika virus is spreading to consider delaying pregnancy.

In February, Pope Francis strongly rejected abortion as a response to fears about the Zika virus outbreak.

The Pope said abortion is not the lesser of two evils, but is a crime and an "absolute evil".

Sources

• The Guardian
• CNN
• Catholic News Agency
• New England Journal of Medicine
• Image: The Guardian

When she tells him she's pregnant, he panics. He says it's not his. Everyone knows she sleeps around. She must get rid of it.

She is angry, confused and most of all, scared. Really scared. The changes in her body tell her that this is not just an "it." A baby is growing inside her. What will she do? She's still a kid herself and her parents are very strict.

Versions of this story are as old as humanity, as are the reactions to a young, unmarried mother. We can well imagine the looks and comments given to Mary as her body swelled with Jesus.

Pregnant by the Holy Spirit? That's a likely story!

We realise the Son of God became flesh this way, so that from conception Jesus was a champion of the poor. Given the culture of the day, his pre-natal life was certainly at risk. His mother could have been stoned to death.

The Church has always been aware of Mary in its pro-life teaching. Protection of mother and child is paramount in Catholic works of compassion.

While support services in New Zealand, are too many to list in detail, we can select one example, the Crisis Pregnancy work of Joseph and Cushla Hassan in Nelson.

Cushla and Joseph are actively committed to the sacredness of life.

The young woman in the first paragraph is in a highly emotional state when she visits Dr Joseph Hassan. In this initial consultation he is a calming influence. He listens to her fears and makes her aware of the life-affirming options available. She leaves his surgery much calmer, aware that she is not alone.

She is offered to see Joseph's wife Cushla, a nurse or one of the pregnancy support team, who offer practical, non-judgmental care.

The world is no longer seen as a hostile place. The teenager meets other pregnant teenagers plus some with babies, and she comes to a different understanding of her new status.

The Hassans are dedicated to a consistent ethic of life. They also teach the Billings Ovulation Method of family planning, proved to be 99% effective.

Now they're extending their support of young mothers, with the proposed MA's Place in Nelson.

MA stands for patron Mother Aubert. There are plans to turn the old presbytery of St Mary's church into a meeting place where young mothers can come together with their babies, learn budgeting and cooking skills, and generally indulge in the pleasure of maternal pride.

If you would like more details about MA's Place or other aspects of the Hassan's work, you can make contact:

Dr Joseph and Cushla Hassan, St Luke's Health Centre, Crisis Pregnancy Support / Hapai Taumaha Haputanga www.crisispregnancysupport.co.nz

Billings Life — Alicia Reeve bomnzalicia@hotmail.co.nz, www.billingslife.org.nz

Mother Aubert House - Carol Marshall, nzmarshalls@gmail.com, 105 Waimea Rd, Nelson 7010, 035481858

Cushlahassan@me.com

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother. grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

Tsiaras has made a video, "From Conception to Birth", in which the milestones of pregnancy can now be witnessed: the heart's first beats; the appearance of color in the eye; the emergence of toes and teeth; the brain and nervous system directing development; the first movement of tiny legs and arms; the first indications of gender; the wondrous symbiosis of mother and child; the symphony of the body's systems coming into being and working in concert.

All this is made possible by revolutions in two sciences. As biologists have decoded the molecular basis of life, computer scientists have developed non-invasive, three-dimensional techniques for visualizing the body.

Alexander Tsiaras has been a pioneer in merging these explorations and discoveries. He has created a virtual camera studio that enables him to view a human body or any part of it individually, scan it, enlarge it, rotate it, adjust its transparency so that we can view inside a living being, and light it from any angle. The result is an ability to illuminate the unseen elements that make us who we are, and the miraculous images in "From Conception to Birth".

"Even though I am a mathematician,"says Tsiaras, "I look at this with marvel: How do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us?"

"The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension," he says.

Watch excerpts from the video

Alexander Tsiaras is an artist and technologist whose work explores the unseen human body, developing scientific visualization software to enable him to "paint" the human anatomy using volume data. He's the author of Body Voyage and co-author of Information Architects.

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