Swapped at birth: How a DNA test changed two women's lives

Two families in the West Midlands are waiting for compensation in the first documented case of babies being switched at birth in NHS history.

It was only taken out of idle curiosity one rainy winter’s day – but the shocking result of a DNA test was to force two women and their families to reassess everything they knew about themselves.

When Tony’s friends bought him a DNA home-testing kit for Christmas in 2021, he left it on his kitchen sideboard and forgot about it for two months.

It did not catch his eye again until one day in February. Tony was at home and bored because his weekly round of golf had been rained off. He spat into the sample tube, sent the kit off, and didn’t think about it for weeks.

The results came on a Sunday evening. Tony was on the phone to his mother, Joan, when the email arrived.

At first, everything looked as he’d expected. The test pinpointed the place in Ireland where his maternal family came from. A cousin was on his family tree. His sister was there too.

But when he looked at his sister’s name, it was wrong. Instead of Jessica, someone called Claire was listed as his full sibling (Jessica and Claire are not their real names – both have been changed, to protect the women's identity).

Tony is the eldest of Joan’s four children. After three sons, she had longed for a daughter. She finally got her wish when Jessica arrived in 1967.

“It was a wonderful feeling, at long last having a girl,” Joan tells me.

However, she was immediately anxious when she heard there was something unexpected in Tony’s DNA results. He was, too, but he tried not to show it. Ten years after his father’s death, Tony’s mother was in her 80s and living alone. He didn’t want to worry her.

The next morning, he used the DNA testing company’s private messaging facility to contact Claire, the woman it claimed was his sister.

“Hi,” he wrote. “My name's Tony. I've done this DNA test. You've come up as a full sibling. I'm thinking it's a mistake. Can you shed any light on it?”

Claire had been given the same brand of DNA test two years earlier, as a birthday present from her son.

Her results had also been strange - there was no connection to where her parents were born, and she had a genetic link to a first cousin she didn’t know and couldn’t explain.

Then, in 2022, she received a notification - a full sibling had joined her family tree.

It was baffling. But in one way, it made perfect sense. Growing up, Claire had never felt like she belonged.

“I felt like an imposter,” she says. “There were no similarities, in looks or traits,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘yes – I’m adopted.’”

The Gift: Switched

In the first series of The Gift, Jenny Kleeman looked at the extraordinary truths that can unravel when people take at-home DNA tests like Ancestry and 23andMe.

For the second series, Jenny is going deeper into the unintended consequences - the aftershocks - set in motion when people link up to the enormous global DNA database.

When Claire and Tony started exchanging messages and biographical details, they discovered that Claire had been born about the same time and in the same hospital as Jessica, the sister Tony had grown up with.

An unavoidable explanation began to emerge - the two baby girls had been switched at birth, 55 years previously, and brought up in different families.

Cases where babies have been accidentally swapped on maternity wards are practically unheard of in the UK. In response to a 2017 Freedom of Information request, the NHS replied that as far as its records showed, there were no documented incidents of babies being sent home with the wrong parents.

Since the 1980s, newborns have been given radio frequency identification (RFID) tags immediately after their birth, which allow their location to be tracked. Before then, maternity wards relied on handwritten tags and cards on cots.

As they tried to absorb the news, Claire and Tony had to decide what to do next.

“The ripples from this will be enormous,” Tony wrote to Claire. “If you want to leave it here, then I'll absolutely accept that, and we won't progress this at all.”

Without hesitation, Claire knew that she wanted to meet Tony and the mother they shared.

“I just wanted to see them, meet them, talk to them and embrace them,” she says.”

When Tony finally told Joan what the DNA test had revealed, she was desperate for answers. How could this have happened?

Joan’s memories of the night her daughter was born are vivid. She had been due to give birth at home, but because she had high blood pressure, her labour was induced in a West Midlands hospital.

“They took me in on a Sunday,” she says. “It snowed that day.”

The baby was born at about 22:20. Joan held her much-longed-for daughter for only for a few minutes – she remembers gazing at the newborn’s red face and matted hair.

The baby was then taken away to the nursery for the night so her mother could rest. This was common practice in the 1960s.

A couple of hours later, just after midnight, Jessica was born in the same hospital.

The next morning, Joan was handed Jessica instead of her biological daughter, Claire.

This baby had fair hair – unlike the rest of the family, who were all dark - but Joan thought nothing of it. There were aunts and cousins with similar colouring.

By the time her husband arrived at the hospital to meet baby Jessica, they were too delighted with their new arrival to have any doubts.

Fifty-five years later, Joan was desperate to know what kind of life Claire had had. Had she grown up happy?

But before she could get answers, she and Tony had to break the news to Jessica, who had lived her entire life believing Joan was her mother, and Tony was her brother.

Tony and Joan travelled to Jessica’s home to tell her in person. Joan says she reassured her that they would always be mother and daughter, but ever since, she says their relationship has not been the same.

Jessica did not want to be interviewed in connection with this story.

‘It felt just right’

A day later – and only five days after Tony got his DNA results - Claire travelled the short distance between her home and Joan’s.

For years, she had been driving through Joan’s village on her way to and from work, never knowing that this was where her biological mother lived.

Tony was waiting for her in the driveway. “Hi Sis,” he said. “Come and meet Mum.”

Claire says that from the moment she saw Joan, it felt like they had always known each other: “I looked at her, and I said, ’Oh my God, I've got your eyes! We have the same eyes. Oh my God, I look like someone!’”

“It just felt right,” Joan says. “I thought, she looked just like I did in my younger days.”

They spent the afternoon poring over family photographs. Claire told Tony and Joan about her partner, her children and grandchildren. They told her all about the biological father she would never get to meet.

But when it came to questions about whether she had had a happy childhood, Claire was evasive.

“I couldn’t tell the truth then,” she says. “My parents separated when I was very young. I don't remember them being together. I was raised in absolute poverty, homelessness, often went hungry, and all that entails. It was a very difficult childhood.”

Claire says that breaking the news to the mother who raised her was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do.

She says she did her best to reassure both the parents she had grown up with, that nothing would change in their relationship. Her mother died earlier this year.

As well as coming to terms with a new genetic identity, there were practical implications for Claire, too. Because she had been born before midnight, she discovered she was a day older than she previously thought: “My birth certificate is wrong, my passport, my driving licence - everything is wrong.”

‘An appalling error’

A couple of weeks after making the discovery, Tony wrote to the NHS trust that oversees the hospital where Claire and Jessica were switched, explaining what the home DNA tests had revealed.

The trust admitted liability – although two-and-a-half years later, the level of compensation has yet to be agreed. Tony and Joan say they were told it would be finalised last year.

We contacted NHS Resolution which handles complaints against the NHS. It said the baby swap was an “appalling error” for which it had accepted legal liability.

However, it said that it was a “unique and complex case” and that it was still working to agree on the amount of compensation that was due.

Claire and Joan have been discovering how much they have in common, such as their tastes in clothes and food, and how they take their tea. They’ve been on holiday, exploring their biological roots in Ireland, and they spent last Christmas together.

“We’re very close,” Claire says of her newly discovered family. “I'd like to spend as much time as I can with them, of course, but that time is gone. It was taken away.”

While Claire now calls her “Mum”, Joan tells me that Jessica no longer does. But Joan feels only that she has gained a daughter.

“It doesn't make any difference to me that Jessica isn't my biological daughter,” she says. “She's still my daughter and she always will be.”

Source: BBC