What drives shareholders into a tailspin, a cohort of prospective parents into crisis, and sends a chief executive packing? An IVF company admitting to not one, but two incidents of embryo implant mix-ups.

Monash IVF must now have reserved a chapter in crisis management textbooks as it joins the ranks of the reputation-damaged corporate lepers.

Monash IVF’s first bungle was the implantation of the wrong embryo.

It is impossible to imagine that an IVF operator’s bungle led to a woman giving birth after carrying someone else’s biological child or, in the latest colossal blunder, the implantation of the wrong embryo.

Words don’t exist to describe what these patients must have felt.

But Monash IVF hasn’t just undermined its own reputation and customer confidence; it must result in a confidence wobble for the entire industry.

The question for both clients and for Monash IVF shareholders is whether a second incident represents a pattern and a flaw in its........

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