DNA Test For Czech Babies Swapped At Birth

A DNA test confirmed that two baby girls in Prague had been mistakenly swapped at birth. The babies had been mixed at the Trebic clinic in southeast Prague, and a test was demanded after one of the fathers became suspicious that his daughter did not resemble him.

Paternity Doubts

Paternity is always a slippery area. Unlike maternity, the proof that a child is biologically a man’s is based on trust, faith and instinct. The harsh reality is that there are a percentage of cases where a child is not the biological offspring of the man thought to be their father. Only a DNA based test can give absolute peace of mind where there’s doubt.

DNA analysis Showed Baby Not Theirs

For Libor Broza, his doubts led him to take a secret test. The results of the test confirmed his suspicions that he was not the girl’s biological father. And when another test revealed the baby was not his or his partner’s, they realised there must have been a mix-up. The mother was devastated by the news. After calling the hospital about the  test results, the hospital contacted Jan Cermak and Jaroslava Cermakova – the other couple who had a baby girl in the clinic on the same day. They also had a DNA test and also discovered they had different DNA to their baby Veronika. The two couples had been raising each other’s babies for almost a year.

Swapped at Birth Trauma

Mr Broza told Czech radio: “Our daughter looks so much like me that I don’t need any DNA tests to know she’s mine. Of course we’re happy, but we also feel terrible…We have raised Nikola for the past 10 months. She’s a beautiful little girl who’s always smiling and it’s impossible to imagine her now living apart from us.” Both sets of parents agreed to swap their daughters on the girls’ first birthday in an attempt to move towards a permanent swap. The first months of a child’s life are formative and the mix up caused huge emotional distress for the parents. Two nurses were blamed for the mix up and dismissed. The two babies were born just 18 minutes apart. From the beginning, there was a query about their identity as the weight of the new-born babies was significantly different from that recorded at the time of birth. Nurses however assured them that there must have been a mistake recording the weights.