No matter what the prevailing circumstances may be…
Right is right and wrong is wrong.
The children belong with their biological parent.
I’d want my biological child back, PRONTO…
Of course the pain of letting the child you raised go would be unbearable and excruciating. I’m sure I’d beg,borrow, steal and face the courts if need be for visitation rights but… abandoning all the emotional issues involved.
Right is right, wrong is wrong and the child belongs with the biological parent.
PS. being the parent of two very beautiful kids, it wouldn’t and shouldn’t make one ounce of difference whether
the child was unattractive, ugly or deformed.
This kinda screws up the whole concept of “adoption”, doesn’t it?
I have to disagree - although the biological family is the “default” and usually the best, after working 5 years with a social service agency I can definitely say that there are numerous instances where children do NOT belong with those who just happen to be biologically related. Plenty of deranged people have “bonded” to their offspring - the worst case I ever heard about was a boy whose father poured gasoline over while he was sleeping and set him on fire. The boy did survive, but was horribly burned. Since the day his father was convicted of attempted murder and lost custody of the boy the man has been going to court trying to regain custody of the boy and seems unable to comprehend why the courts continue to keep him from his son. The boy has since grown into a man, who has testified in court at least once that he has no inclination to ever see or hear from the “sperm donor” that gave rise to him. While the victim was in college he was stalked by his father, who is quite indignant about his “parental rights” being denied. Granted, this is a particularly nasty case, but clearly a situation where the boy was better off being raised by an adoptive family (which is what happened) than by his biological father. If this boy had been switched at birth he might have been better off.
What matters is the best interests of the child - which can be difficult to determine, I admit. The interests of the child should take precedence over those of the parents, even when this results in pain for the adults. The absolute worst would be a tug-of-war with the kid being switched back and forth between two families, which could happen with the way our courts work. I don’t think this is a situation where there should ever be a set rule, but rather examine each instance on a case-by-case basis.
BroomS:
No one was asking about adoption, thats a whole different ballgame.
If a child is switched, it belongs with the biological parent.
I’m sure we could come up with thousands of “what if” examples… the bios are nuts,druggies and other nightmare situations… but in the first round the bios win…
ding… ding…
and then take it from there.
How people work in “social services” I will never know. It has to be one of the most heartbreaking jobs on the planet.
I dont know how they do it…
My hats off to them.
Say the switch was discovered after 5 years. Would you demand your biological child back when it meant handing over the child you’d raised for 5 years? We’re assuming that the other parents are willing to swap the kids back, and that they are nice people raising your child in a manner you approve of… would you pass back the child you’d thought was your own flesh and blood for 5 years, and take the child you’d never known you were missing in it’s place?
The OP is flawed. No one can predict how they would react in this situation without knowing what the other family is like. If they were your equals in every way (i.e. financially, socially, morally), it would make a hard situation a little easier. You would probably continue to raise the child that you were given at the hospital, and organise a visitation schedule so you could form a relationship with your biological child. However, if the other couple were, say, poorer than you, would you feel obligated to try and help out so your biological child could experience a life like you would have provided? Would you want your child raised by a family who follow a different faith? Would you object to your child being raised by a single mother with a bunch of deadbeat boyfriends? You are going to feel a sense of responsibility to both children, and trying to chose which child should stay with a family you don’t approve of would be torture.
It’s a nightmare to contemplate. You could never be content raising the wrong child while your own flesh and blood is living with strangers, but you could never send away the baby you’ve loved as your own in exchange for a child you don’t know. I can see why so many of these cases seem to end up with one family trying to take both children - how could you let either one go?? There are other things too… like, what if the family that got your baby gave it a name that you hate. I would be bothered by that. I noticed that in the story of Callie and Rebecca, Paula Johnson applied to have Rebecca’s name legally changed to Callie after she found out Rebecca was her daughter (she didn’t want the baby she had being renamed Rebecca - she wanted two Callies). Her application was rejected, but it did make me think… I mean, I have objections to a certain popular boys name because I was attacked by someone by that name once upon a time… it has bad vibes for me now. If I discovered that my biological son had been given that name… well, it would creep me out. You can imagine a family that named their child John because they wanted a simple classic boys name finding it hard to accept that their real son had been named Moonbeam or Tarzan by the family that had ended up with him by mistake.
There are so many factors affecting this that it is impossible to know how you would react if you were in this circumstance.
How is this different from adoption, especially from the child’s point of view? A child accepts as mommy and daddy the people who raise him or her - at 4 or 5 or 6 they don’t understand biology. Switching the kids back to the “bio” families at that age would mean taking children out of the only home they’ve ever know, away from the only parents/siblings they have known, and placing them with total strangers. How on God’s green earth will that benefit the children???
This situation can get very ugly so easily. Imagine one set of parents to be observant orthodox Jews, the other set to be missionary fundamentalist Christians, and two boys. One set of parents will be horrified their child hasn’t been baptised, the other set will be horrified that their child may not be circumcized or bar mitzvahed. There is simply no way to raise both children in both religions at the same time. Most likely the Christian family will want both children to raise as Christians to save their souls. The Jews would want their Jewish child back to be raised as a proper Jew - and the non-bio child will raise all sorts of issues regarding conversion since, under orthodox Judaism, you are Jewish only if you are born to a Jewish mother or convert. You’d wind up with two couples, both very sincere in their beliefs, with little or no room for compromise.
What happened, according to the news reports I remember, and the mini-series (I know,not a great source of unbiased fact, but it jibes with the news magazines) is that the switch was discovered when the Mrs. Twitchell was tested for compatability with her daughter. She decided not to attempt to find her biological daughter at the time. Over a year later, after her daughter died, she decided (by all indications, it was her alone making the decision for both parents) do find and get back the daughter she had lost, she said, for the girl’s own good. If she really had Kimberly’s best interest at heart, she would have left her alone. The ensuing custody fight caused Kimberly Mays nothing but pain, especially since the Twitchells insisted on carrying on over her objections. They didn’t really care what she wanted (if they did, they’d have left her alone in accordance with her wishes), they just wanted her back, and were willing to do anything and hurt anyone, including Kimberly, to meet that goal. Kimberly Mays would have been better off if she’d never known about the Twitchells.
I agree with this part : Right is right, and wrong is wrong. Can’t argue with that anymore than I could argue with Blue is blue and red is red. Also true, and also meaningless.
The question is what is right in this situation? I would argue that what is right is whatever is best for the child involved. The parents interests should be taken into account, but are secondary to the best interest of the child. Biological parents and other relatives get first presumption in ordinary custody cases, and the burden falls on others to prove that the biological relatives are unfit parents, but this is clearly an extraordinary case, so the normal presumptions don’t apply. Biology isn’t an absolute.
A few years ago, a young woman was dying of a terminal illness, and arranged for her adoptive brother to adopt her child/children, even naming him in her will as her preferred parent. (I forget if there was more than one). Upon her death, he applied for adoption as a surviving blood relative, and the adoption was proceeding as normal, until the paternal grandparents filed a petition to adopt based on their being the closest blood relatives. Their claim was that the brother’s petition was invalid due to the fact that his being adopted means that he wasn’t actually a blood relative. The brother, sister, and everyone involved had assumed that once someone is adopted, they are legally no different than a biological child. That is, though he wasn’t medically a blood relative, he was legally a blood relative. (The law in the state was later changed to indicate that adoptees are to be legally considered blood relatives, but this had no effect on the case due to it being enacted after the fact). The brother reapplied but by this time there was a third application for adoption.
The only reason the paternal grandparents could give for their being better suited as parents was biology. The brother had his sister’s blessing, and on top of that was adopted himself, so he was uniquely qualified to understand what the child would be going through as an adoptee. This was on an episode of 48 hours, and I never found out how it came out.
Biology is not morality. Contribuiting sperm or an egg does not make one best suited to raising a child. I agree with the initial presumption in favor of biological parents, but it should be far from considered an absolute.
It was Arlene Twigg/Kimberly Mays. Arlene died of a congential heart condition, but Barbara Mayes died of ovarian cancer. I read a hideous book on the case which suggested the switch was deliberate and probably engineered by the Mays, who didn’t want to give a sick mother a sick child. Of course, the fact that Mrs. Mays wasn’t diagnosed with cancer until after the babies were switched is irrelevant. The book also portrayed Robert Mays as a child abusing monster. Odd that nobody ever reported this until the bizarre case went to court.
The author of the book, Loretta Schwatz Mobel, also co-wrote the book written by Mary Beth Whitehead, mother of Baby M. This book portrays Ms. Whitehead in a very favorable light, while leaving out several of the most important facts of that case.
The child in the case, Kimberly Mays, had a son who was taken away from her for neglect. Pad parenting lives on.
Annie-Xmas, I did a search at Amazon.com, Borders.com, and Barnes and Noble.com for that author, but couldn’t find anything. You don’t happen to remember the name of the book, do you? I’d be interested to read more about that case.
The one thing I still don’t get, is in this day and age how such switches still occur.
Each time I’ve given birth the ID tags for the baby (one ankle tag, one wrist tag) have been prepared as soon as I hit the hospital - my eldest is 21, so this has been standard practise for a long time. I just can’t think of a situation under which a baby would end up with the wrong ID tag.
I saw a follow-up on the case to which wishbone referred above the other day - and yes, it’s currently still before the courts, although each side currently has visitation rights in respect of the child to whom they are biologically related, while retaining custody of the other child.
I just feel enormous empathy for everyone involved in these situations, but still believe that ultimately, the best interests of the children concerned should trump everything else.
Whoops! It was Loretta Schwartz Nobel. I forget the title of that book, but she also co-wrote “A Mother’s Story” with Mary Beth Whitehead, about the Baby M case. I consider her to be very prejudiced in both cases.
The book may be out of print. I found it in the $1 rack at the Strand Bookstore in NYC.