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Best friends exchanged as infants 41 years ago - on purpose
Two Native Americans who have been friends for years have now learned that they were swapped 41 years ago when they were born. This was confirmed by DNA tests. It was probably not a confusion, but possibly a deliberate exchange of babies.
When newborns are reversed
It is probably one of the worst parental nightmares that babies in the hospital could be reversed. Unfortunately, it happens again and again. Last year, for example, a case was reported in France in which parents demanded compensation because their babies had been swapped in a hospital 20 years earlier.
Sometimes it takes even longer for the truth to come to light. Two Canadians have now learned that they were reversed 41 years ago as babies in the clinic. This probably happened intentionally.
One of the worst nightmares for parents is that their children could be reversed at the hospital. Unfortunately, that happens again and again. In Canada, only two men have learned that they were reversed 41 years ago. (Image: Andrey Popov / fotolia.com) Two friends exchanged 41 years ago
According to "CBC News", two Canadians who have been friends for many years have been exchanged at birth 41 years ago. According to tears at a press conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba, capital of Manitoba province, David Tait Jr. of the Cree tribe said recent DNA tests have shown he is the birth child of the woman who raised his friend Leon Swanson. At the same clinic, two newborns had been exchanged in the 1970s.
DNA testing brought the truth to light
The two friends had been born at intervals of three days. Leon Swanson was born on January 31, 1975, in the government-run Native Hospital in the small community of Norway House. David Tait Jr. followed on February 3. The DNA tests now proved that the two men were each raised by the biological mother of the other.
Tait said everyone involved wanted "answers" as to how this could happen. "We have no words." He was "disturbed, confused, angry".
Not the first confusion in the clinic
Already last November it had become known that in the same clinic and in the same year two other babies had been exchanged. This case made sure that Tait and Swanson could be tested.
Canada's Health Minister Jane Philpott now wants to investigate the background to the two incidents, CBC reports. It also offered DNA testing to all persons born in the hospital in the mid-1970s. The hospital was known as the "birth center" of northern Manitoba because it was the only hospital in the region in the 1970s.
Better health care for indigenous people
A statement said: "The results of this review will be published. Cases like these are a pitiful reminder of how urgent the need is to provide high quality health care to all indigenous people. "
Although the indigenous people of Canada represent only a minority in the country, when it comes to economic or social disadvantage, their percentage of the total population is very high.
Criminal acts
Former Minister Eric Robinson said of the incidents, "I can only describe this as criminal. We can live with one mistake, but two mistakes of a similar kind can not simply be dismissed as mistakes, in my view it was rather a criminal act ". He added: "Here lives were stolen." (Ad)