For me, it's also chilling from a personal perspective. When I was born (in 1961 -- also in a small hospital in rural Manitoba), it was common practice for babies to be kept in the nursery and brought to their mothers for feedings, etc. My mom had had ecclampsia, and was there for two weeks after I was born. I remembered that years ago, she told me that one day she took one look at the dark (likely Indigenous) face in the bundle they handed her and told the nurse this was NOT her baby. They eventually found me and brought me in to her.
I've never done a DNA test (yet) -- and I'm not worried -- anyone who looks at me, and then looks at my parents, and/or my sister, knows whose child I am! (My sister and I were known as "the Bobbsey Twins" at school when we were growing up...!) But it did give me pause when I heard this latest story. It's scary to think that such mix-ups could (and did) happen, and that I could very easily have wound up with the wrong family, and led a very different life -- and then when I read that this particular case is the THIRD such case discovered in Manitoba from that era...! Yikes!!
You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.
I wonder if people used to have the idea that humans are interchangeable (or, at least some humans). How else can you explain the laxness in matching babies with their actual mothers. Yikes, indeed!
ReplyDelete@Lori, yes! And as dh pointed out, most of these cases happened in smalltown hospitals... it WAS the "baby boom" era, and they kept them in hospital after birth a lot longer than they do today -- but how many newborns could there have been in one small hospital at one time? I can maybe see it happening in a city hospital -- so many more babies to keep track of -- but seriously?
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