The couple at the center of an embryo mix-up case involving a Seminole County fertility clinic will raise the baby girl the woman gave birth to in December even though it is not their biological child, according to an agreement they have reached with the genetic parents.
“I’m glad the parties have reached an agreement while this child is relatively young,” Circuit Court Judge Margaret Schreiber said during a court Monday.
According to the “mutually devised custody agreement,” Steven Mills and Tiffany Score will “continue as the permanent custodial parents of their daughter,” the couple’s attorney Mara Hatfield said in a court document filed Friday.
In April, Mills and Score announced they had learned the identity of their daughter’s biological parents and made it clear, as they have since their case became national news, that they wished to continue raising the baby girl.
But at that time it was not clear if the other couple would try to seek custody, and their rights to do so were murky under Florida law.
The identities of the genetic parents of the six-month old girl are being kept private, according to the document.
Score and Mills used the Longwood-based Fertility Center of Orlando for in-vitro fertilization to become parents. But soon after Score gave birth, the couple realized that their baby girl was not their biological child, given that she is of another race.
They said they loved their baby and wanted to continue to raise her but also sued the clinic, seeking to find the child’s biological parents and to learn the fate of their own embryos frozen at the facility.
The couple had three embryos frozen in 2020. The first that was implanted ended in a miscarriage, and the clinic says one remains. But that leaves one unaccounted for, as the wrong embryo was implanted into Score in April 2025, resulting in the daughter she gave birth to in late 2025.
Nothing in the new agreement suggests the couple has learned the fate of that missing embryo, including whether it was wrongly implanted in another woman as a result of a separate mix-up by the clinic.
In a April statement, Mills and Score said they realize they may never get an answer from the now-closed clinic they accused of sloppy work. “Questions about the disposition of our own embryos are still unanswered and are even more unlikely to ever be answered,” the statement said. “Only one thing is as absolutely certain as it was on the day our daughter was born — we will love and be this child’s parents forever.”
The fertility clinic admitted that Score had been implanted with an embryo from another couple — that mother was known as Patient 004 — not with one created with her egg and Mills’ sperm.
As a result of a lawsuit filed by Score and Mills, the clinic conducted extensive DNA testing of other embryos created at the same time as Score’s and Mills’.
Patient 004 was identified this year as the biological mother of the girl, primarily because she was the clinic’s only other patient in March 2020, when Score and Mills had embryos created and frozen at the clinic.
The two couples have met in person in recent weeks to discuss their next steps, including who should receive custody of the girl.
Also, according to Friday’s court document, Score and Mills have secured another fertility center to receive what the Fertility Center of Orlando said was the couple’s remaining frozen embryo.
“That embryo will be tested for parentage and then the Plaintiffs [Score and Mills] will determine next steps,” Hatfield stated in the court document.
The testing should take up to six weeks to complete. However, there is a chance that that third embryo could be genetically tied to Patient 004, Hatfield said. Or “there is a minor risk” that the embryo could be genetically tied to either the couple or Patient 004, she said. In that case, the case would go back to court to compel the clinic to find out whose embryo it is.