A Newborn Was Sent Home From The Hospital With The Wrong Parents

A newborn little girl was healthy and perfect, only she was sent home with the wrong parents and nobody noticed until they got home.

By on August 20, 2018
(Photo by Ronald Dumont/Express/Getty Images)

Oops. These new parents were overjoyed after their daughter was born. They were sent home with their new baby once the process was over, but they soon discovered that their baby wasn’t their baby.

It happened in Montenegro, and the hospital says they’re investigating the incident. A newborn baby girl was sent home with the wrong parents. You hear about this happening a lot more than it actually happens. Look at literature throughout the years – a lot of popular stories start out with babies switched at birth. TV shows use the idea for plots, movies, etc. We might make jokes about a sibling who’s a littler “different” from the rest of the family as well. It’s one of those scary things that we hear about but never really “see” in person.

The hospital in question with this story genuinely had a lapse in properly identifying this baby, and sent her home. The baby was handed to the parents, I’m sure some vitals were taken and charts noted, and the couple had to have made it past security and other doctors on the way out. And still, despite all that, nobody noticed that the tag on the baby didn’t match the mother. Not even the parents themselves. The hospitals investigation will hopefully find out how it happened, and whether or not it was a deliberate swap.

How often does this actually happen though? Again, it’s mostly a plot in books or movies, but it does happen. According to this website, there were only 8 documented cases of baby-switching between 1995 and 2008. It also says that babies are “switched” about 6 times on average in the initial hospital stay. 1 out of every 1,000 births seems to have a baby-switching issue, but the problems are all usually caught before going home. Also, there doesn’t seem to be a standard procedure for reporting swapped babies to a medical journal or anything like that. So it really makes you wonder how many are out there and don’t know it. It does happen.

Around the site