The DNA test that showed two women had been swapped at birth

[SerendipityJane]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3njqd9nl9o

This is such a sad story. I'm not comfortable with all the dna testing nowadays. The people who bring you up are your parents.

It’s not DNA testing that’s causes the issues, it human error or lies and a lack of support. At least with adoption children can make sence of it before they find out. This was a bomb shell and not prior warning of what to expect or how to behave -

Once recently had a daughter looking for her mother having been left as a young child with her father - turned out he wasn’t her real father -

The mother had an affair and just left the baby.

How sad is that?

They have the tracking devices in Merseyside as I've had two children and they constantly go off and have to be reset by a midwife 🙄

When did you have your babies? I think in the 50s when medicalised births and hospital births were on the up they just put women out cold or gave them drugs that made them trippy. There’s an episode of Mad Men called “The Fog” where Betty gives birth and it shows it from her perspective, she’s basically hallucinating. The podcast “Child” on BBC - can’t remember which episode - says there was a fashion for really rich women at one point to have a “perfect birth”, they sedated the women and tied them up in a cot and then they’d wake up with amnesia about it. After any of those experiences I’d understand mothers not recognising their babies.

I had my children in two different hospitals, one had the radio thing on her before we left the delivery room, the other just had the plastic name band, they were very different! If my eldest had been taken out of the maternity ward the alarm would have sounded! She also had the name bands so I thought the radio device was to stop anyone stealing her rather than to identify her.

I find that quite shocking. I'd have thought a private hospital would be more up to date and know how important those first few days are- definitely not the time to separate mum and baby! Not the 80s anymore, quite cruel to the baby to take it away.

Mine definitely didn't get any tracking tag, the name tag was just plastic. The other was a homebirth so no chance of being swapped then!

Of course we should, but I can't imagine being in this position and my first thoughts not being about how this would affect the daughter I raised rather than rushing to build a relationship with my "new" daughter.

How do you know what her first thoughts were? Jessica didn't take part in the programme; it would be an invasion of her privacy to talk at length about her in her absence.

Jessica still has a mother, brother and extended family. The shared experiences and memories, the influences that have contributed to making her the person she is today - they haven't been wiped out.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to discover that DS was swapped at birth. He was taken away immediately after birth due to breathing difficulties. He came back perfectly swaddled and content. I spent hours with him as a tiny baby staring at him trying to work out who he was, it took me ages to fall in love with him. He looks nothing like me or his dad and his personality is very different to the rest of the family. I knew that accidental swaps never happen, then I read stories like this… he is 15 and I do mildly worry about the hobby DNA test. Logically I know he is mine, the likely hood of a swap is so minuscule, but there is still a niggle in the back of my mind.

Midwife here, I work currently across 6 or 7 different London hospitals - not a one of them uses, or ever has used any kind of radio tracking. They all use plastic wrist/foot tags.

What a load of old nonsense that particular comment was from whatever nameless NHS spokesperson made it (up).

I wouldn't blame the DNA tests. Some may prefer ignorance over the truth, but I believe that for every story where DNA stirred up problems, there are several others where it has had a positive effect.

We don't know the family dynamics at play in this case. Quite possibly the brother and mother should have gone about things differently, but I also suspect the mother-daughter relationship was already complicated before all this happened.

As an aside, this reminds me of something (film or TV) where the father had a Sharpie ready to mark the baby's foot to avoid mix-ups. Honestly, I think I would!

I wonder if Claire would have been so enthusiastic if she hadn’t had a shit childhood and her parents weren’t dead.

I can honestly say that if someone told me now I’d been switched at birth and my parents weren’t my parents I wouldn’t want to know.

And if I found out through DNA testing I wouldn’t tell my parents.

If Jessica didn't want to be involved in the article/podcast it may just be that everyone agreed not to mention her rather than deliberately pushing her out.

I also would not have recognised a newborn I'd seen briefly and all matted and bloody while I was exhausted if a clean swaddled one was handed to me the next day.

I doubt very much that this is the only swap though - if it happened once it could happen a hundred times.

I feel sorry for Claire - to have had such an awful childhood and now to be seeing what she should have had. Must be very difficult.

I think my babies all had rfid tags/barcodes on their plastic wristbands but I don't see how they are inherently more accurate than written information - they are still reliant on a human inputting the details and putting it on the right baby?

But many people do want to know. Many people who are adopted and have lovely adoptive parents still want to know their birth family. Some people don't feel at ease with themselves without knowing ' where I came from', so to speak. Often a person feels like the odd one out in the family, can't understand why they look different, or have a different personality. I'm not saying that finding out is always good, but I think many are curious or unsettled.
Not to do with DNA, but I found out by doing my family tree, that my dad's oldest brother wasn't actually his full brother. His mum gave birth as a single woman in 1896. She later married and had 4 kids. It explains why he looked so different. All 3 parties knew, my grandfather was still his 'dad', but today it might cause issues.

You mean biological mother.

Both women are the mothers of both children. They are biological the mother of one and the "mum" of the other they are raising.

According to the article, both Jessica's biological parents were still alive when the swap became known in 2022. The mother died this year. It was Claire and Tony's biological father who had died without knowing. As Jessica didn't take part in the interviews, we don't know whether or not she made contact with her biological family.

I'm another one who absolutely wouldn't recognise which baby was mine in a line up. As long as the race and sex were what I was expecting, I wouldn't have noticed anything else. A combination of babies all look alike; I'm aphantastic; and post-labour fatigue, pain, and the rest are not keeping me at my peak mental acuity.

So I was right!

My DD was born in a London hospital.

Having read this article, I don't think the family should have agreed to publish it. The way it is written celebrates that "Clare" and her biological mother have been reunited, but essentially suggests that "Jessica" was never a satisfactory daughter and that "Clare's" parents and family were pretty poor All of which may or may not be true, but it is clear "Jessica" didn't want to be involved in the interview, and it is now on the record that "Clare's" parents didn't give her a happy childhood and dragged her up in poverty.

I think they could have been reunited (and recompensed by the hospital) without media involvement.

He wasn't her biological father but was her dad if he brought her up.

Surely one recognises their own baby?

In the past, nurseries were used in hospitals while mothers recovered for a few hours, but wrist and ankle bands were used with the baby's name on them.

Often a baby looks just like its parents , and mothers can even 'smell' their own baby.

What a horrible shock to find out your baby isn't ''Yours''.

I too don't think these DNA 'Ancestry' tests are a good thing.

''Jeremy Kyle'' used to do them , probably as it was 'entertaining' for the TV audience.

''Our DNA test says that you are NOT the child's father! Neither of you are! It is someone else...''

Cue both men running off, and the woman crying saying ''It can't be true!''

Never mind the poor child.

What suggested that Jessica wasn't a satisfactory daughter? That seems like an odd reading of it to me.

I’ll be vague as not only my story to tell.
A much earlier decade than this story, a whole lifetime of a life lived.
A dna testing website to start with but later qualified by dna specialists.

After a few days they would recognise their own baby and see relatives in them. Within a few minutes or hours of birth, unless the newborn had very distinguishing features, then I doubt it. Especially once the baby had been taken off to be washed and swaddled.

My mum was separated from my oldest sister for over a week......she didn't see her at all as she was poorly and that's just how it was then.

I've often wondered if some sort of switch happened, my sister doesn't look anything like us. She's very dark to the extent that she's had racial abuse from strangers on more than one occasion......I've even considered getting us all ancestory DNA kits for Christmas but imagine that would go down like a lead balloon if anything came up. 😬

Part of my mums birth story for me and my DB is that my dad was under strict instructions to follow the nurses wherever they took us so we wouldn't be accidentally switched. Both late 80s babies.

I had mine in 2020 and asked my husband to do the same. We weren't too worried as she came out looking just like him and was the only ethnic baby on the ward that day.

She definitely had a radio tag thing as I walked around with her once and an alarm went off when we got too close to the door.