By Le Figaro
Posted 36 minutes ago, updated 8 minutes ago
The case happened in the kindergarten, where children are admitted almost systematically for a few hours after birth. Illustrative image. Fred Facker /stock.adobe.com
One of the mothers is said to have discovered the maternity defect through a DNA test a few weeks after the birth.
Two babies switched at birth. This is the story spread by several Bulgarian media outlets on Christmas Eve. The amazing affair happened on September 13 at the very famous Sheinovo Maternity Hospital in Sofia, Le Monde reports.
Everything begins in the kindergarten, where the children are almost systematically admitted for a few hours after birth. This practice, which Bulgarians inherited from communism and which is increasingly criticized, has created confusion. If the babies did indeed have numbered bracelets to distinguish them, these were not checked when the children were handed over to the parents. This mistake was confirmed by the director of the maternity hospital, Roumen Velev, who was surprised that the parents had not paid attention to it for several months.
One of the mothers eventually questioned her child’s identity because of the lack of resemblance and the color of his eyes, which she found very dark, reports Le Monde. She would then have had a DNA test a few weeks after the birth, which would have confirmed the mistake of motherhood.
“Archaic Organization”
The director apologized to both families and assured them “that this has never happened to him in his thirty-year career,” reports the daily newspaper. The official investigation should clarify what could have led to this confusion: “Negligence was proven at several levels of the chain,” Health Minister Asen Medzhidiev had already denounced.
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The two children must remain with their legal parents for the time being pending a possible trial. “First, the birth certificates of these children must be challenged from the mother’s point of view. I don’t know if the parents are married. Those are things that are really going to take time,” said Maria Petrova, a lawyer specializing in medical law at broadcaster bTV. The latter denounced the “archaic organization” of Bulgarian hospitals.
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