Wrong parents: some cases where babies have been switched at birth
Posted November 13, 2015 1:56 pm.
Last Updated November 13, 2015 2:45 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
DNA tests have confirmed that two men from a northern Manitoba First Nation were switched at birth 40 years ago. The two have called for an investigation into what caused the mix-up at a federally run hospital in Norway House in June 1975.
Some other cases where newborns were sent home with the wrong parents:
— In February 2015, a French court ordered a private clinic in the Riviera city of Cannes to pay out 400,000 euros each to two 20-year-old girls switched at birth. A nurse’s assistant had accidentally given baby Manon Serrano, who was in an incubator, to another mother after the girl’s birth in July 1994, and gave the infant next to her to Sophie Serrano.
— In May 2014, a South African court approved an investigation into two baby girls mistakenly given to different mothers in 2010. The mothers ended up disagreeing over how to resolve the traumatic situation. One of them, who was single and unemployed, learned about the mistake while trying to get child support.
— In October 2011, two Russian families with 12-year-old daughters won $100,000 each in compensation from a maternity home that mixed up the girls. The families learned about the switch after the former husband of Yuliya Belyayeva refused to support their daughter, Irina, because she didn’t look like him. A DNA test revealed that neither of them was Irina’s parent. An investigation tracked down Irina’s biological father, Naimat Iskanderov, who had been raising Belyayeva’s own child, Anna.
— In 2008, two Brazilian men, Dimas Aliprandi and Elton Plaster, learned they had been accidentally sent home with the wrong parents more than 20 years earlier. The discovery didn’t bring bitterness or recrimination, but led to the creation of a bigger family. In 2010, they were living and working together with both sets of parents growing vegetables and coffee on a small farm in southeastern Brazil.
— In 1990, an 11-year-old Florida girl at the centre of a baby swap met the couple proven through genetic tests to be her parents. Kimberly Mays was born at a rural hospital in central Florida and went home with the wrong parents. At the time of the discovery, the girl she’d been switched with had died of a heart defect two years earlier.
