Shocked women learn they were switched at birth – almost 60 years later

Two women in Norway were shocked to learn they had been switched at birth and were only caught up in the fiasco almost 60 years later due to an alleged government cover-up.

The grown women, who are now both 59, have now joined Karen Rafteseth Dokken — one of the mothers who received the wrong baby — in suing the state over the change, the Associated Press reported.

Dokken had given birth to a daughter on February 14, 1965, at a private institution in central Norway called Eggesboenes Hospital, where babies were kept together while mothers rested in separate rooms. A week later, she returned home with a child, named Mona after her mother, whom she assumed was her offspring.

Dokken found it odd that her daughter had sprouted black curls, but assumed she took after her husband’s dark haired mother and raised her as her own.

Only after the turn of the millennium did she realize that Mona was not hers and that her real daughter, Linda Karin Risvik Gotaas, was being raised by someone else.

She would have found out sooner, except Norwegian health authorities, who discovered the mundane incident in 1985 when the girls were teenagers, had covered it up, the AP reported.

“I never thought that Mona wasn’t my daughter,” Dokken, now 78, said through tears as he testified in 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 latest case, all the women claimed that the Norwegian authorities had violated their rights and damaged their right to family life, for which they owed the trio an apology and compensation.

Lawyer Kristine Aarre Haanes, who represents Mona, stated that the state “has violated her right to her identity for all these years”, adding that “they have kept it a secret”.

“Her biological father is dead,” the plaintiff 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 fighting back, citing the fact that the 1965 exchange took place in a private facility in the 1980s, when they did not have the authority to warn other families about the disaster.

It is still unclear why the exchange happened in the first place; however, reports suggest it was one of several baby changers that appeared in Eggesboenes in the 1950s and 60s.