Baby swapped at birth returns home

A British father and his wife who were given the wrong baby by a hospital in El Salvador have been allowed to travel home to the US with their child.

Richard Cushworth and his Salvadoran wife Mercedes Casanellas have been waiting over eight months for a birth certificate for their son Moses.

After initially taking home the wrong baby, DNA tests proved he had been swapped with another boy.

They were both returned to their real parents eight months ago.

Ms Casanellas gave birth in her native El Salvador in May 2015 and her son spent his first night in a hospital nursery.

But the next day – unknown to her – she was given a different baby to take home.

The couple told the BBC they still have no idea how the swap happened.

Mr Cushworth, originally from Bradford, West Yorkshire, said they have spent over eight months trying to get the right paperwork to bring their son home, a process that has almost bankrupted the family.

Ms Casanellas said she became suspicious when she noticed the features of the newborn differed from those of the boy doctors had handed to her when she gave birth by emergency Caesarean.

“He was just passed by me and I gave him a kiss and then he was taken to the nursery and that was the last time I saw him,” she said.

The next day nurses brought her a baby and insisted it was hers, despite her immediate doubts.

She said she thought the second baby’s skin was darker.

After returning to their home in Dallas, Texas, Ms Casanellas took a DNA test four months later which said there was a 0% chance she could be the mother of the baby she had been given.

She said the most difficult moment was handing over a child they had nurtured since birth.

“The thought that the baby I had been nursing, taken care of, loving him, bathing him, that he was not mine and then I had another thought which came with it -where’s my baby? So I had two thoughts — what’s going to happen with this baby and where’s my baby.”

Media captionThe moment the parents were reunited with their newborn baby son

Mr Cushworth said: “I just accepted it as my child. Now I look back at the pictures around the time we came to Dallas when he was three months old, and I’m shocked that I never suspected, because you can see that it’s just obviously not my child if you look at some of the pictures.

“I don’t know how I didn’t ask myself. You just don’t think about these things. Who thinks about these things?”

His wife added: “I think we were in love with the baby. Even when I did the DNA tests, I thought I was betraying him. That was the feeling I had – I’m betraying my son but I cannot live with this.”

Both babies were quickly returned to their biological parents but the Cushworths have since been trying to get a birth certificate, so they could return home to the US.

They were helped by the British Ambassador to El Salvador, Bernhard Garside.

“When we first got involved it looked very much like an uphill struggle,” he said. “My fear was we weren’t really going to see a happy conclusion to this.”

He said swapping the babies back was “the easy bit”, but unravelling the paperwork took a long time through the Salvadoran court system and was only completed thanks to “good old fashioned diplomacy”.

“If we have been able to play a part in it somewhere then it makes my job worthwhile,” he said.

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