From the very first moment, the mothers knew something was wrong
‘I woke up desperate and crying from an afternoon nap, and I knew all of a sudden that there was something wrong with my baby’, told the mother, Maria Lorena Gerbeno, to the Spanish C5N channel. The Argentinian woman had given birth to a daughter two weeks before, and the baby had been switched with another one.
According to Maria’ story, she felt something was wrong when she got her baby back: the little girl seemed heavier than before. ‘I told the nurse something wasn’t right, but she assured me that everything was fine.’ Maria went home and looked after the baby with utmost patience and love, but she couldn’t get rid of the thought that she wasn’t her child.
It turned out that her suspicion was well grounded when, at a routine visit to the doctor three weeks after giving birth, she met Veronica Tejada, who had given birth on the same day as her. They started chatting, and Veronica also confessed that she felt she was raising someone else’s child. The events sped up after that: Maria and her husband requested a DNS examination, and so did Veronica.
The results proved the mothers’ suspicion: they were raising each other’s children, because somehow the hospital switched the babies. There is no precise information on how it happened, because the hospital’s representatives refused to offer any comments.
The mothers who switched back their children are finally happy, and they plan to start a legal process against the hospital.
A rare, but not unheard-of event
Fortunately, these and similar cases are very rare. In 2009, most recently, a Russian family found out that the hospital where the woman gave birth switched her baby. But this family wasn’t as fortunate ad the Argentinian one: the mistake was discovered only after 12 years and a DNS examination.