In 1965, a woman gave birth to a baby girl in a private hospital. Seven days later she returned home with a baby.
When the baby developed dark curls that made her look different from herself, Rafteseth Dokken assumed she just took after her husband’s mother.
It took nearly six decades to discover the true reason: Dokken’s biological daughter had been mistakenly switched at birth in the maternity ward of the hospital in central Norway.
The girl she ended up raising, Mona, was not the baby she gave birth to.
The babies — one born on Feb. 14 and the other on Feb. 15, 1965 — are now 59-year-old women who together with Rafteseth Dokken are suing the state and the municipality.
In their case, which opened in the Oslo District Court on Monday, they argue that their human rights were violated when authorities discovered the error when the girls were teenagers and covered it up. They claim Norwegian authorities had undermined their right to a family life, a principle enshrined in the European human rights convention, and demand an apology and compensation.
Rafteseth Dokken, now 78, was in tears as she described learning so many years later that she got the wrong baby, according to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
“It was never my thought that Mona was not my daughter,” she said in court on Tuesday. “She was named Mona after my mother.”
Mona described a sense of never belonging as she grew up. That sense of uncertainty pushed her in 2021 to do a DNA test, which showed that she was not the biological daughter of those who raised her.
But the woman who raised the other baby knew long before.
A routine blood test in 1981 revealed that the girl she was raising, Linda Karin Risvik Gotaas, was not biologically related. The woman raising her, however, did not pursue a maternity case. Norwegian health authorities were informed of the mix-up in 1985, but refrained from telling the others involved.
Both women who were swapped at birth have said in interviews that it was a shock to learn about the mix-up, but the knowledge made pieces of their lives fall into place, explaining differences both in terms of appearance and demeanor.
Kristine Aarre Haanes, representing Mona, said the state “violated her right to her own identity for all these years. They kept it secret.”
Mona could have learned the truth when she was a young adult, but instead “she did not find out the truth until she was 57.”
