Two women in Norway were shocked to learn that their names had been changed at birth and that they had to face the uproar nearly 60 years later due to an alleged government coverup.
The adult women, now 59, have now teamed up with Karen Raftseth Dokken – one of the mothers who received the wrong baby – to sue the state over the switcheroo, The Associated Press reported.
Dokken gave birth to a baby girl on February 14, 1965, in a private, central Norway institution called Eggesboens 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 considered her own child.
Dokken found it strange that his daughter had black hair, but assumed that she took care of her husband’s black-haired mother and raised her like her own mother.
It was not until the turn of the millennium that he realized that Mona was not his and that his real daughter, Linda Karin Rysvik Gotas, was being raised by someone else.
She would have known sooner, the AP reports, except for Norwegian health officials who discovered the tit-for-tat incident in 1985 when the girls were teenagers and covered it up.
“I never thought that Mona was not my daughter,” Dokken, 78, said tearfully as she testified in Oslo District Court on Tuesday.
The situation was especially difficult for Mona, who did not learn that Dokken was not her biological mother until 2021, after taking a DNA test when she was 57 years old.
In the recent case, all of the women claimed that Norwegian authorities had violated their rights and curtailed their right to a family life, requiring all three of them to apologize and pay compensation.
Christine Arre Haines, the lawyer representing Mona, declared that the state had “violated her right to her own identity for so many years,” adding that “they kept it a secret.”
“His biological father has died,” the petitioner said. “He has no contact with his biological mother.”
Interestingly, the woman who raised Dokken’s biological daughter had learned the truth long ago in 1981, but neglected to pursue a maternity case.
Meanwhile, Norwegian health officials are fighting back, citing the fact that the 1965 swap took place at a private institution in the 1980s when they did not have the authority to alert other families of the disaster.
It is still unclear why this exchange occurred in the first place; However, reports suggest that this was one of several baby switches that took place in Eggesboens in the 1950s and 60s.
