Imagine carrying a baby for nine full months, only to discover weeks post-delivery that the child you carried, delivered, and loved is not your own.

This dystopian nightmare became a reality for two couples in California, when Daphna and Alexander Cardinale noticed that their new daughter May’s dark hair and asian features clashed significantly with their own pale skin and fair hair. Upon investigation, Daphna and Alexander learned that the fertility clinic that had assisted them in using in vitro fertilization to conceive May had messed up. This egregious malpractice resulted in Daphna carrying and delivering a child who was not her own; 10 minutes away, May’s biological parents had carried Daphna and Alexander’s biological child to term.

The ensuing, heartrending chaos these poor couples experienced offers a cautionary tale on the risks and ethical issues inherent in the wildly unregulated IVF industry. Though tragic, the Cardinales’ horror story is a natural byproduct of an industry that commodifies human life for lucrative gains.

In the past few months since the Alabama Supreme Court IVF decision that sparked national controversy, many concerned Americans have pointed to the disturbing lack of regulation on the IVF industry. The industry commodifies and monetizes human life, with a single round of IVF projected to cost up to $30,000 and the industry raking in about $25 billion per year. The process involves creating a “conservative estimate” of 10 embryos on average per round of IVF, with an estimated mere 2.3% of those embryos resulting in a successful birth of a baby. The process of selecting a successful embryo often involves uncomfortably eugenic selections of the best traits possible, as if the child were a Build-A-Bear rather than a human soul with inherent dignity.

Worst of all, the process involves freezing or discarding millions of embryos, each a distinct human soul,  every single year. Parents such as the Cardinales who successfully complete IVF are thus left with the pressing responsibility of determining what to do about the rest of their embryos. Do they freeze them indefinitely? Do they engage in the even more immoral practice of destroying them? What might the clinic do with their embryos long-term?

They also are often forced to reconcile with the consequences of commodifying or commercializing human life. In the words of Emma Waters, senior research associate at the Richard and Helen DeVos Center, “As IVF separates sex from procreation, couples experience heightened temptations to view children as an act of the will and not a gift received.”

Such commercialization or utilitarian exploitation of human life seems inevitably to lead to the breakdown of human relationships. This quickly became evident in Daphna and Alexander’s case. First of all, the traumatic experience of discovering that their daughter May was not their biological daughter was an enormous burden to bear.

Alexander began having severe panic attacks, while life “took on a nightmarish quality for Daphna,” in the words of the New York Times. Daphna reportedly felt numb and spent days crying alone in her bathroom fearing that she would lose custody of May. Meanwhile, May’s biological mother Annie seemed to have intrinsically sensed something was wrong even before she received a call from the clinic informing her of the mixup. She had struggled with “bouts of melancholy” after her daughter Zoe’s birth, which transformed to depression after discovering the shocking news.

The couples ultimately engaged in a drawn-out process of swapping the children back, but even after each couple had officially regained custody of their biological daughter, guilt and stress remained. This was despite the fact that both families sought to remain close and even to “merge” their two families somewhat for the sake of babies May and Zoe.

Both couples rightly feared that the mix-up and swap would negatively affect May and Zoe in the long run, and how could it not? From the moment of conception, May and Zoe had been petri-dish potential, carefully prepared to be perfect babies for their respective parents. Unshockingly, the same industry that makes billions annually off of the commodification of human lives messed up, most egregiously at the expense of innocent children.

Both May and Zoe deserved to be created through the love of their parents, and to be raised by those same parents. Instead, they were essentially abandoned by the parents who had grown to love, know, and care for them and placed in the care of their biological parents, who didn’t know them at all and who guiltily struggled to feel attached to them.

Daphna struggled with guilt for feeling closer to her non-biological daughter May, whom she’d carried in her womb for nine months, than she felt to her biological daughter Zoe. She also coped with guilt for giving May up. Just ten minutes away, Annie was “distraught” at her inability to comfort her biological daughter May, who cried “inconsolably.” The New York Times piece recounts this tragic and disordered image: of May sobbing and Annie’s heart “breaking for a baby she already loved, but who was sobbing, she was sure, for a mother Annie could not possibly be at that moment.” Alexander meanwhile, felt like a “fool — made to love a baby who wasn’t his to raise.”

Sadly, the Cardinales’ tragic situation was not their fault. Modern society has promised couples like the Cardinales that the morally problematic and egregiously unregulated process of IVF is a tenable solution to infertility, rather than a holistic analysis and response to underlying problems. The IVF clinic’s disturbing malpractice, and the Cardinales’ resulting “guilt” and grief, point to the deeper truth that IVF is inherently a disordered and dehumanizing response to human suffering at the expense of human dignity and human life.

It also reveals the dangers of playing God with the creation and perverted commercialization of human life.