Compensation for French baby swap families
February 10, 2015
The southern French clinic at the center of the mix-up was on Tuesday ordered by a court in the town of Grasse to pay the women and their families a total of almost two million euros (about $2.2 million) in compensation.
The amount given was substantially less than the 12 million euros (about $13.6 million) in damages the families had sought. The money was to be divided between the families with 400,000 euros for each girl, with the rest allocated to their parents and siblings.
The two baby girls were diagnosed with jaundice shortly after they had been born in July 1994 and were placed in the same incubator for light treatment at a clinic in Cannes. It was then they were accidentally swapped by an auxiliary nurse.
The father of one of the girls, Manon Serrano, grew increasingly skeptical over the years about whether she was his biological daughter due to her darker skin. A DNA test revealed Manon, then aged 10, was related to neither her father nor her mother. That prompted a probe which uncovered the switching at birth and identified both girls and their families.
The girls met their biological parents for the first time when they were 10 years old, but remained living with the parents they grew up with.
"You find yourself in front of a woman who is biologically your mother but who is a stranger," Manon Serrano (pictured right at a previous court hearing) said of the initial meeting.
Blame and confusion
Although the parents had raised concerns that they had been given back the wrong baby at the clinic, they ended up taking the children home. According to mother Sophie Serrano (pictured left) and her non-biological daughter Manon, defense lawyers had argued in court during a closed-door hearing in December that the mothers were at fault for not recognizing their children. That argument was swiftly rejected by Manon Serrano who spoke out in defense of the woman who raised her.
"She protested, she found herself in front of a qualified nurse, she was very young, she had just had a child, so putting the blame on her is absurd, I find that inhuman."
se/rg (AFP, dpa)