After Seeing Her Newborn’s Face, Mom Knows He’s Not Hers — Takes DNA Test To Prove Herself

Dec 02, 2021 by apost team

Mothers have intuitions about their children that others may not be able to understand. From knowing when a child may be unhappy or hiding something to understanding the unsaid pain, mothers are deeply intuitive and empathetic about their kids. For many mothers, this is the case from the moment their baby is born.

Therefore, when one mother immediately believed that the newborn that was handed to her was not hers, she knew what she was talking about. When you hear of a DNA test, it's often because the father of the baby doesn't think that the baby is his. There are no qualms about whether a mother is actually the parent of a baby. 

However, when Mercy Cushworth, who lived in Texas, suspected that the baby given to her was not hers, she was told that it was merely confusion on her part. Mercy, a Salvadoran, married her British husband Richard and they welcomed their son in May 2015 in El Salvador. This is a happy occasion, and the couple was overjoyed. However, Mercy only saw her son once right after he was born, and when she was handed her baby and told it was her son, she had a seed of doubt. 

Speaking to BBC News, she said that the nurses insisted that the baby was hers even though she made her doubts vocal, and soon enough the couple sunk into their routine. However, the feeling that her son was someone else never left her, and she finally turned to a DNA test to prove that she wasn't wrong. The results validated her mother's intuition. 

Mercy told BBC News that she had gone through an emergency cesarean section, "He was just passed by me and I gave him a kiss and then he was taken to the nursery and that was the last time I saw him." When the nurses brought her a baby the next day, she noticed that his skin was much darker than her own and her husband's, which caused her to think that the boy was not her own. However, after repeated assurance that her son, who she named Moses, was actually hers, she returned to her home in Texas. 

While trying to get a birth certificate for Moses, she took a DNA test to confirm that he was her baby, but it only confirmed her worst fear: she had a 0% relation to Moses. "I just fell to the floor," she said.

"The thought that the baby I had been nursing, taken care of, loving him, bathing him - that he was not mine. And then I had another thought which came with it - where's my baby?" she added. "So I had two thoughts - what's going to happen with this baby, and where's my baby?" 

Richard also said, "I just felt a panic that my only child was lost or stolen, I didn't know." By that time, both Moses and the Cushworths' son were four months old, and efforts made to track down the exchanged baby proved successful. However,  the couple said the happiness of getting their own son back was matched with the sadness of having to give the other boy, Jacob, away.

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"We were rushed in and we had to go really quickly and we barely had time to say goodbye. I got all his clothes and we handed him in. That was the most difficult part of all the situation," Mercy explained. 

Mercy also told the publication, "I just accepted it as my child. Now I look back at the pictures around the time we came to Dallas when he was three months old and I'm shocked that I never suspected, because you can see that it's just obviously not my child if you look at some of the pictures." She also elaborated on how difficult it was to give Jacob away. "I think we were in love with the baby. Even when I did the DNA tests, I thought I was betraying him. That was the feeling I had - I'm betraying my son but I cannot live with this." 

While it became clear that the babies had been swapped, the process of returning their own son to the US became much more complicated for the Cushworths. Richard said they had spent nine months trying to get the right paperwork to bring their son home to the US. Unfortunately, the process almost bankrupted the family. Richard said about it, "It has forced our family to be separated, it's been awful. I thought it would be a matter of days, maybe weeks but not nine months. It has been dreadful."

Thankfully, they were helped by the British Ambassador to El Salvador, Bernhard Garside, and their efforts paid off. They welcomed baby Moses back into their arms in 2016. 

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