Baby swapped at birth by hospital returns home after nine months

Parents to the swapped baby

A baby accidentally swapped at birth by the hospital has finally returned home, after more than a year. 

Only now have British dad Richard Cushworth and his Salvadoran wife Mercy been allowed to travel back to their US home with their son Moses, after DNA tests proved he had been swapped with another boy by a hospital in El Salvador.

Both babies were returned to their real parents eight months ago, but Richard and Mercy needed to wait for Moses’s birth certificate before they could take him out of El Salvador.

‘The thought that the baby I had been nursing, taken care of, loving him, bathing him – that he was not mine,’ Mercy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘And then I had another thought which came with it – where’s my baby?’

Mercy, who gave birth in El Salvador in May 2015, first became suspicious after noticing the newborn’s features and skin tone were different to those of the baby she was handed after her emergency Caesarean.

However, when she expressed her doubts the nurses insisted the baby was hers.

The couple took the baby home with them to Dallas, Texas, but when Mercy took a DNA test,  it revealed that there was 0% chance she was the mother of that child.

Richard, who is originally from Bradford, said: ‘I just felt a panic that my only child was lost or stolen, I didn’t know.’

Both babies, who were four months old by this point, were swiftly returned to their biological parents – but getting the right paperwork together to bring Moses back to the US was a nine-month, financially crippling process.

‘It has forced our family to be separated, it’s been awful,’ Richard said. ‘I thought it would be a matter of days, maybe weeks but not nine months. It has been dreadful.’