critics say that two young mothers should have noticed that they were given the wrong babies
In France, a Baby Switch and a Test of a Mother’s Love
GRASSE, France — When Sophie Serrano finally held her daughter, Manon, in her arms after the newborn, suffering from jaundice, had been placed under artificial light, she was taken aback by the baby’s thick tufts of hair.
“I hadn’t noticed it before and it surprised me,” Ms. Serrano said in an interview at her home here in southern France, not far from the Côte d’Azur.
Ms. Serrano, now 39, was baffled again a year later, when she noticed that her baby’s hair had grown frizzy and that her skin color was darker than hers or her partner’s.
But her love for the child trumped any doubts. Even as her relationship unraveled, in part, she said, over her partner’s suspicions, she painstakingly looked after the baby until a paternity test more than 10 years later showed that neither she nor her partner were Manon’s biological parents. Ms. Serrano later found out that a nurse had accidentally switched babies and given them to the wrong mothers.
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The court decision ended Ms. Serrano’s long struggle to obtain damages for the nurse’s negligence. It also helped her, she said, silence those neighbors and others who accused her of lacking maternal instinct and criticized her inability to identify with her own child.
“After four days, how can you not recognize your baby?” Sophie Chas, the lawyer for the clinic, told the newspaper Le Figaro. “We can believe in it when it’s a second, a day, two days. But 10 years? The mothers may have been involved in creating the damage.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/world/europe/in-france-a-baby-switch-and-a-test-of-a-mothers-love.html?_r=0
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