A Spanish woman who discovered she had been switched with another baby at the hospital she was born in has won nearly €1 million in compensation.
The 23-year-old, who has been granted the right to remain anonymous, was in her mid-teens when she took a DNA test that turned her world upside down.
She found out that her parents were not her biological mother and father, and contacted health authorities to discover how this could be.
An investigation which took four years to complete confirmed that staff at the San Millán Hospital in Logroño, in northern Spain, sent home two newborns with the wrong parents after they were born in 2002.
The circumstances which led to them being separated from their mothers is not clear, with authorities attributing the mix-up to ‘human error’.
To add to her pain, the woman discovered that her birth mother had died in 2018 – during the investigation – and the two never met.
Both women affected by the mix-up launched legal cases.
The woman whose birth mother died claimed €3,005,060 for ‘irreparable damages.
Both were awarded €850,000 (£740,000), while she was awarded an additional €125,000 (£109,000).
This was because her legal parents had been unable to raise her due to severe disabilities, forcing her to experience abandonment issues and ‘instability’ while she was raised by her legal grandmother.
‘On behalf of the government of La Rioja, we accept the ruling, we respect it, and we fully comply with it because it is only right to recognize moral damages in such sensitive and delicate cases’, a spokesperson for the local government said.
The compensation, which may be increased following an appeal, will be paid by the insurers of the regional Rioja Health Service.
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