Two women in Norway were shocked to learn they were switched at birth and had only caught wise to the fiasco nearly 60 years later because of an alleged government coverup.
The grown women, who are now both 59, have now teamed up with Karen Rafteseth Dokken — one of the mothers who received the wrong infant — to sue the state over the switcheroo, the Associated Press reported.
Dokken had given birth to a baby girl on Feb. 14, 1965, at a private, central Norway institution called Eggesboenes Hospital, where babies were kept together while mothers rested in separate rooms. A week later, she returned home with a baby, named Mona after her mother, whom she assumed to be her progeny.
Dokken found it peculiar that her daughter sprouted black curls but assumed she took after her husband’s dark-haired mother and raised her as her own.
It wasn’t until after the turn of the millennium that she realized that Mona wasn’t hers and that her real daughter, Linda Karin Risvik Gotaas, was being reared by someone else.
She would have found out earlier except Norwegian health authorities, who discovered the tot-for-tat incident in 1985 when the girls were teenagers, had covered it up, the AP reported.
“It was never my thought that Mona was not my daughter,” a tearful Dokken, now 78, said while testifying at the Oslo District Court on Tuesday.
The situation was especially difficult for Mona, who didn’t discover that Dokken wasn’t her biological mother until 2021 after taking a DNA test when she was 57.
In the recent case, the women all claimed that Norwegian authorities had violated their rights and undermined their right to family life, for which they owed the trio an apology and compensation.
Lawyer Kristine Aarre Haanes, representing Mona, declared that the state “violated her right to her own identity for all these years,” adding that “they kept it a secret.”
“Her biological father has died,” the litigator added. “She has no contact with her biological mother.”
Interestingly, the woman who raised Dokken’s biological daughter had learned the truth much earlier in 1981 but neglected to pursue a maternity case.
Meanwhile, Norwegian health authorities are battling back, citing the fact that the 1965 swap occurred in a private institution in the 1980s when they did not have the authority to alert the other families of the calamity.
It’s yet unclear why the swap occurred in the first place; however, reports suggest it was one of several infant switches to transpire at Eggesboenes in the 1950s and ’60s.
