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Mother's Instinct: How One Woman Knew Her Baby Was Swapped at Birth
A mother felt her newborn was switched right after birth, but doctors laughed when she voiced her concern. The resolution of this story proves that a mother's intuition should never be underestimated.
It seems like every so often we hear about cases where babies are switched at birth. Yet, it's rare that parents notice and speak up at the right moment.
Mercedes Canales from El Salvador was admitted to the delivery room with strong contractions, a full five weeks before her expected due date. She was quickly taken in for a C-section. This was her first pregnancy, and she was excited to meet her firstborn. But as soon as the baby was handed to her for the first time, Mercedes immediately felt something was not right.
"I can't explain it, but the moment he was in my arms, I felt he wasn't my child," Mercedes recalled in an interview with the BBC. Despite fearing she'd be labeled paranoid, Mercedes shared her feelings with the medical staff. However, "they laughed and insisted I was hallucinating. They blamed my suspicions on the medications I received during delivery and suggested I should just calm down," she recounts.
Mercedes was embarrassed by her own feelings.
"It was so strong in me, but how do you tell others? No one understood what I was talking about."
Mercedes and her husband, Richard, took the baby home, but as time passed and the child grew, Mercedes's feeling that the baby wasn't hers only intensified. "He didn't look like us at all, neither me nor my husband. It was upsetting for us. There wasn't anything about him that reminded us of ourselves."
As time went by and their concerns grew, the couple decided to undergo a DNA test to resolve the issue once and for all. "When the results came in, we were both totally shocked, but it was a shock that subsided quickly after the initial moment," Richard recalls.
"My fears were confirmed, and the test revealed that the child we had been raising for over a year was not ours."
The police in El Salvador launched an investigation and discovered that Mercedes's baby had been swapped with another infant by one of the other mothers in the ward. The baby was returned to Mercedes healthy and sound. The police investigation into the case continues.
