Two 53-year-old women spent their lives in the wrong family after birth confusion in 1969 at Springdale Cottage Hospital in Newfoundland and Labrador.
On the morning of September 24, 1969, Ruth Lush gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Dora Arlene Lush, after a cousin. During his convalescence in the hospital, his daughter was brought to him. To her surprise, Mrs. Lush does not recognize her. It wasn’t the same baby she had stroked the night before, she thought. But the nurse immediately reassured him: babies can change quickly. It was indeed her baby.
However, as she grew up, the differences between Dora Arlene and the other Lush children were more and more obvious. Dora was redheaded and full of freckles, while her sisters were blond with milky skin.
For her part, the other baby, now grown up, Caroline Weir-Greene, has always wondered about her identity. Adopted by her aunt, she found herself too different from her cousins, who liked to taunt her by telling her that her father might not be her real father.
So it was with a head full of questions that she one day opened an email containing the results of a genealogy kit she had made. That’s how she saw a list of surnames appear that had nothing to do with her current name. She also learned of the existence of one of her sisters, somewhere in Halifax, whom she hastened to contact. Her sister, who was actually Mrs. Lush’s eldest daughter, put them in touch.
Ruth Lush was in shock. She learned that her biological daughter had been raised in a fishing hamlet an hour away and that Dora Arlene’s biological parents had both died.
Shared experiences
The story of the swap quickly spread around the municipality and others shared similar experiences at Springdale Cottage Hospital.
Joan Bugdell, for example, had a baby handed to her in a pink blanket after birth. However, she had given birth to a boy. The nurse, who was initially skeptical, disappeared to investigate and eventually returned with her son.
Same story for Jenetta Burton, who also received a daughter instead of the son she had given birth to a few hours earlier.
At the time, the only way to identify babies at birth in rural hospitals in the region was by using small, identified bracelets, which could be mixed up from time to time.
“I guess these things can happen anywhere, but I’m really surprised to hear it happened there,” said a nurse who worked at Springdale Cottage Hospital at the time, Valerie Combden.
“I can’t imagine the trauma the parents went through. My deepest thoughts and prayers go out to them. It’s really terrible,” she added.
Other similar cases in Canada?
Although cases of birth switching are rare, they are not non-existent in Canada. In 2015 and 2016, two separate cases were discovered in a federal hospital in northern Manitoba in the 1970s.
In response, Health Canada offered free DNA testing to people born in the hospital during this period and ordered an independent investigation, which found that the changes were accidental and the result of not following proper procedures. standard IDs.
Newfoundland Provincial Minister of Health and Community Services Tom Osborne offered his condolences to the affected families, but did not apologize. He says he is looking at what has been done in Manitoba to see if it is possible to do something similar in the case of Newfoundland. However, he does not believe that an independent investigation is necessary.
That’s not the view of Progressive Conservative health critic Paul Dinn, who insists on the right of families to know if it’s an isolated incident and if the changes took place deliberately or because of of a flaw in the system. “At a minimum, these families are entitled to an apology,” he said.