Two women born in 1967 at the same hospital in the West Midlands, England, discovered they had been switched at birth. The BBC tells their unusual story.
For these two families, life has not been smooth sailing in recent years. Two families from the West Midlands, England, are seeking compensation for a case of swapping babies at birth, the BBC reported this Saturday, November 2. Two women, Jessica and Claire (first names have been changed to protect their anonymity), born in 1967, discovered in 2022 that they had not been raised in their biological family.
This revelation took place thanks to DNA tests carried out almost by chance. In 2020, Claire's son gave her a DNA test for her birthday. She had noticed some strange results, but didn't dwell on them. Until in 2022, a man contacts her: it is Tony, who himself has just taken a test whose results confirm that she is his biological sister.
Claire never felt like she belonged to the family she grew up in. “I felt like an imposter,” she told the BBC. “There was no resemblance, neither in terms of appearance nor in character traits,” she adds. So when Tony reveals his results to her, Claire thinks she's adopted.
“I look like someone”
The story is more complex, however, as Tony explains that he has a sister born a few hours apart from Claire, in the same hospital in the West Midlands. Their mother, Joan, told the BBC that when she gave birth, her baby was quickly placed in the hospital nursery for the night. The next morning, it was Jessica who was entrusted to Joan in place of her biological daughter, Claire.
Jessica did not wish to testify to the BBC. Joan says she has moved away since these revelations and no longer calls her “mom.” “It makes no difference to me that Jessica is not my biological daughter,” she assures. “She remains my daughter and always will be.”
For her part, Claire met her biological family and in particular her mother: “I looked at her and I said to her: 'Oh my God, I have your eyes! We have the same eyes. Oh my God, I look like to someone!” She now says she is “very close” to them.
A “terrible mistake”
“I would like to spend as much time as possible with them, of course, but that time is over. It has been stolen from us,” she laments today. Claire also has to face many administrative problems, notably because her official date of birth is not the correct one – she was born after midnight. “My birth certificate is wrong, my passport, my driving license, everything is wrong,” she says.
Speaking to the BBC, NHS Resolution, the department of the United Kingdom's public health system responsible for managing complaints, acknowledged an “appalling error” on the part of the hospital where Claire and Jessica were born. The families affected by the exchange are awaiting compensation from the health system, which, for its part, is facing the first documented case of baby exchange in its history, according to the BBC.
