A long-term baby mix-up case in the Eastern Mediterranean region

Abstract

The movie “La vie est un long fleuve tranquille” tells the story of events starting with the attempt of a nurse to hurt the physician she works for by switching 2 babies he helped deliver, ending with the truth surfacing 12 years later. Baby mix-ups are not only material for an interesting movie plot, it also happens in real life. According to the Tanderberg annual report 1998, 1 out of 8 babies born in US hospitals are delivered to the wrong parents [1]. Baby mix-ups can occur in a number of ways. A baby may be deliberately switched with another, for example in societies where girls are socially less desirable and giving birth to a boy is important to preserve the marriage union, a baby girl may be switched with a baby boy [2]. However, hospitals usually notice the exchange of babies of a different sex and resolve the matter in a relatively short period of time. Secondly, babies may be involuntarily separated from their families during a natural disaster and be cared for by another family. In this case, relatives may claim the child on the basis of physical resemblance. One of the best known cases is baby number 81, one of nearly 1000 babies that became orphaned in the wake of the tsunami earthquake in South Asia in 2004. Through a public address officials tried to locate the parents of the baby. Nine couples responded claiming they were the parents. In fact, one of the couples was arrested during an attempt to abduct the baby from the hospital. A DNA test enabled the baby to be returned to its biological parents. The third instance is when, due to the negligence of hospital staff, babies are handed over to the wrong family after delivery. Baby mix-ups caused by hospital staff negligence are usually reversed in a few days in most cases. However, in big hospitals without any reliable ID recording system the baby mix-up may not be noticed for a long time, until the mother, father or child become suspicious and make an inquiry. These traumatic events in the life of parents and child are underreported in the literature, because they go unnoticed or are corrected by the hospital in the first few days after the mix-up. The psychological and social dimensions of the event have not been explored adequately. This report of a baby mixup case in the Eastern Mediterranean region aims to contribute to the literature in this field. We report on the case of 2 boys—one Turkish, one Saudi Arabian—delivered at a private hospital in 2003 and given to the wrong parents, a fact which was not discovered until 4 years later.