Parents who became convinced that their baby had been swapped at birth have been reunited with their biological son.
The parents, both of whom are devout Christians, also announced that they had decided to call their baby Moses – who is now four months old – because he was “lost but is now found”.
The Weekly reported on the couple yesterday: the father, Richard, is British-born, and the mother, Mercedes, is from El Salvador, and they met when both were working as Christian missionaries. Although they now live in Texas, they decided to return to El Salvador so Mercedes could give birth to their son in her home country.
Mercedes said the child she gave birth to had been noticeably pink; the child she was given to take home had darker skin and Mercedes was convinced that he was not hers. A DNA test proved it.
The couple feared that their actual son may have been sold to people traffickers but the Sydney Morning Herald reports that it was a mix-up in the nursery which resulted in two couples taking home the wrong babies.
“Late on Monday, the country’s Attorney General’s Office said it had located the couple’s real son after calling the parents of four other boys born on the same day at the same hospital in for DNA testing,” the Herald says.
“Attorney general Luis Martinez said the babies of two couples had been accidentally mixed up.
“We have returned the babies to their legitimate parents. We hope that this has not happened on other occasions,” he said.
“We understand the painful drama of these two families. We are talking about two children who were swapped.”
Mercedes had been raising the dark-skinned child as Jacob, but she will call her biological son Moses. It isn’t yet clear what if any contact she will be allowed to have with Jacob and vice versa. Each couple cared for the other’s baby for a little more than four months.
