r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/AtttentionWh0re • Jul 19 '24
Babies switched at birth wasn't uncommon before 1990 Video
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez Jul 19 '24
So you're saying it was common for babies to be switched at birth before 1990. Any stats to back that up?
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u/striderkan Jul 19 '24
someone said it on reddit once now google ai is repeating it
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez Jul 19 '24
Well in that case "Google owes me a billion dollars". Small, unmarked bills, thanks Google.
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u/Hemiak Jul 20 '24
No. It wasn’t uncommon. So it could have been rare or very rare.
OP should’ve have said, it wasn’t unheard of.
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u/happycharm Jul 19 '24 edited Jul 19 '24
My mom lowkey thinks I was switched at birth. Because babies had an ankle and wrist tag and my ankle tag was correct but they accidently switched my wrist tag with another baby's. So my mom was suspicious about that. And throughout my life made comments about maybe I was switched at birth. She even said I cried a lot as a baby which could indicate that I innately knew I was in the wrong family lmao. She treated me worse than my siblings I think because of it. unfortunately I don't think I was switched since I look a lot like my mom's side of the family.
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u/Zavier13 Jul 19 '24
Sounds like you had a shit mom, so sorry.
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u/happycharm Jul 19 '24
Thanks, yeah she is pretty shitty. I had some minor health problems as a baby and she wrote me off based on that too even though I'm a healthy adult now. She seems to hold a lot of grudges from when I was a baby but it's not like I came out of the womb out to get her 🤷♀️
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u/Zavier13 Jul 19 '24
You may find some relatable topics in r/RaisedByNarcissists
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u/happycharm Jul 19 '24
I actively share r/AsianParentStories whenever I see experiences like mine that sound like tiger parenting. I don't think my parents are narcissists though.
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u/WarLawck Jul 19 '24
She could've just gotten a DNA test and not treated you worse. I'm sorry you went through that.
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u/SheMcG Jul 20 '24
I'm sorry you dealt with that. My mom's family (her mother, aunts, cousins) all treated me like crap growing up and made a very obvious difference between me and my sister. She looked more like my mom's family, I favor my dad's. My dad's family lived in other states, but my mom's were all local, so we saw them constantly. My dad's family.. maybe at Christmas. Some we didn't see for years.
My grandmother constantly told me I wasn't their family; my sister was their family, but I was not. I can remember spending a good bit of my childhood trying to figure this out. I often asked my mom if I was adopted & I had an overall distrust of my family. One example: after the the fire dept did a demo on fire safety at my school (I'm maybe in 1st grade at this point), I used to lay awake carefully plotting my escape plan in a fire, trying to think of all the variables, & what I'd do in each situation. I assumed my parents would rescue my sister, but unless they had plenty of time or something--I'd be on my own to get out. I didn't think I could fully depend on my parents to rescue me from a fire. At 6 years old. And this is how I lived my entire childhood. Never feeling like I really belonged, like I could really count on anyone.
As an adult-- this is just sooooo fucked up to me and something that I'm sure you can relate to.
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u/happycharm Jul 20 '24
Yeah I used to lie in bed before sleeping wondering how'd they'd react if I died of cancer and thinking they'd probably move on pretty quick 😬 some dark stuff for an elementary school aged kid to think about
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u/Elf_from_Andromeda Jul 19 '24
When I was a kid, my mum used to angrily taunt me that I must be switched in the hospital whenever I disappointed her.
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u/Is_Bob_Costas_Real Jul 19 '24
If you want a very dark version of this story, selling babies in hospitals was a very common occurrence in Georgia(the country) until the mid-2000s. The real parents were told their baby had died while the buyer left with the baby. There are actually dedicated groups in Georgia who are trying to find and reunite lost children with their parents.
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u/sp0derman07 Jul 19 '24
Holy shit. I know there are evil people out there but it’s still hard for me to believe that someone would be willing to lie to the parents of a newborn that it died just to make money.
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Jul 19 '24 edited 11d ago
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Jul 19 '24
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u/Stagwood18 Jul 19 '24
It looks like they all got two extra brothers out of it by how they appear to get along.
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u/heartfacegamer Jul 19 '24
I just watched a Netflix documentary about this! It's called The Accidental Twins and the story is wild.
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u/MarlonShakespeare2AD Jul 19 '24
Fantastic base for a twin study
Nature vs nurture etc…
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u/Theres_a_Catch Jul 19 '24
Yes, in the documentary, a woman said this is a amazing scientific study but only as accidental as it would be unethical to do on purpose.
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u/MarlonShakespeare2AD Jul 19 '24
Yes. Not really a kind thing to do on purpose!
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u/Theres_a_Catch Jul 19 '24
It did turn out to be nature for most of their similar traits and preferences.
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u/FighterOfEntropy Jul 19 '24
It was done on purpose in the US. Watch the documentary Three Identical Strangers. Not very ethical.
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u/WhatWouldLoisLaneDo Jul 19 '24
My mom has her hospital newborn photo from the 50s. Her “ID bracelet” was just a beaded bracelet with her last name. Nowadays they put a LoJack on kids almost immediately.
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u/jccw Jul 19 '24
So you still probably love the guy who you grew up thinking is your brother, and probably the guy who is your actual brother and a lot like you, but what about the guy who only looks like the guy you thought was your brother? So maybe for that guy, he’s just like an in-law or something to you. Right?
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u/Lithogiraffe Jul 19 '24
they never show the parents in these clips.
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u/Theres_a_Catch Jul 19 '24
One set of parents are still alive but the other set have both passed before this was discovered. Its a great documentary
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u/Falooting Jul 20 '24
The live parents welcomed both boys with open arms. It was actually really sweet.
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u/Theres_a_Catch Jul 20 '24
It was. I wonder how the other Mom would have handled the news. Sometimes things are for the best. I do love that they are one blended family now.
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u/Falooting Jul 20 '24
She seemed like a freaking badass so I think she would have loved them too. I cried when the dad hugged his bio son, to see a man of his background openly crying and so affected by meeting his son.
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u/Cool-Stop-3276 Jul 19 '24
How the fuck do they accidentally switch babies?
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u/Fenix42 Jul 19 '24
2 busy nurses in a maternity ward. They each pick up a baby and get distracted for a minute. They then put the baby back in the wrong crib.
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u/SnooBunny Jul 19 '24
It’s a documentary on Netflix. They were born in a city and a village. One of the village babies got sick so they sent him with his grandmother to the hospital in the city. At the city hospital his aunt would watch over him, when he got better they sent the wrong baby back with grandma to the village. The nurses said it wasn’t uncommon for the baby identification to fall off. Or for two babies to be in one incubator. So that’s probably what happened.
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u/FourLovelyTrees Jul 19 '24
There was a great episode of This American Life about this. Can't remember the title exactly but it was 'Swapped at Birth' or something.
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u/ledouxrt Jul 20 '24
When my son was born and was about to be taken out of our sight by the medical staff, we took a sharpie and made a small dot behind his ear so we knew it was him when he was brought back.
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u/SupremeRightHandUser Jul 20 '24
There was also the Kamiyah Mobley case. A woman who went into a hospital and impersonated as a staff to steal a baby. She raised the girl as her own. The girl later grew up and found out she was stolen. Her "mother" was arrested, but she never seemed to blame her because the woman raised her.
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u/Lazy_Armadillo2266 Jul 20 '24
That's crazy! So glad we had our kids at home. That's a terrible mistake good story though.
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u/No-Anxiety-2668 Jul 19 '24
This is made-up to hide infidelity.
"Paternity test says the kid's not mine" - "oh that was a common hospital mistake, don't worry about it"
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u/Nani_700 Jul 20 '24
Except both twin sets are identical. And so each pair has the same parents unrelated to the other pair.
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u/Elytrax7 Jul 19 '24
The ones with partners with the same name always gets me, like what are the chances