French clinic ordered to pay €400,000 to each of swapped babies – now adult women – and €300,000 to parents after mixup 20 years ago

Like most young mothers, Sophie Serrano was happy, but bewildered and exhausted after the birth of her first baby.



When the child, whom she had named Manon, who was suffering with jaundice, was returned to her after a spell in an incubator, she did notice the baby’s hair seemed to have grown remarkably fast, but the nurse said not to worry. “That’s what happens under the lights,” the woman told her.

In another room at the private maternity clinic on the French riviera, another new mother was having similar concerns. Her baby daughter, Mathilde, who had also been put in an incubator with jaundice, had shorter hair than she recalled.

Not wishing to make a fuss about something that was surely nothing, the young mums went home with the infants they had been given. And so began the extraordinary and disturbing saga of two families whose babies were accidentally swapped by a careless auxiliary nurse shortly after they were born.

On Tuesday, more than 20 years later, a court awarded the girls, now young women, and their families more than €1.8m (£1.34m) compensation.

Sophie Serrano, 38, said she was happy and relieved at the decision, which she added had assuaged years of personal guilt.

“Finally, after so many years, the error has been recognised. Now I’m cleared of everything. I’ve no reason to feel guilty for anything any more,” she told French television. “The clinic has been found responsible I feel liberated vindicated.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manon Serrano (right) and her mother Sophie Serrano leave Grasse courthouse. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP

Manon said she was also relieved. “Now I can move on. It’s finished. We have nothing more to fight for. We have done the hard bit and it’s a relief.”

Despite her brief doubts, Sophie Serrano had thought no more of what had happened in the maternity clinic after she took her baby home. However, as the child grew so did the wagging tongues as locals noticed that Manon had different hair and darker skin than either of her parents. Some, said Serrano, went as far as to suggest she was “the postman’s child”.

In the school playground, Manon was teased. Her mother told her to take no notice and assured the girl: “Your father is your father.”

Concerned that the girl bore no resemblance to him, however, Manon’s estranged father insisted on a paternity test. It showed he had no biological connection to his daughter.



Serrano also underwent a DNA test and was astonished to discover she had no genetic link to the child she thought was her own. “I was lost, completely knocked sideways,” she told journalists later.

Serrano alerted the clinic, and an investigation was launched. She also told Manon who was immediately terrified she would lose everyone she had grown up with. “I was afraid of being separated from her, from my family, my life. What does a 10-year-old do when she learns something like this?”

The authorities discovered that after Manon was born on 4 July 1994, there were two other newborns at the clinic, a girl called Mathilde and a boy, who also had jaundice. As there were only two incubators equipped with lights to treat the babies, the two girls were put in the same machine. They were unwittingly switched when returned to their mothers.



“At that moment, I had a doubt. I noticed that she had more hair. It struck me as odd and I mentioned it, but unfortunately nobody listened to me. The nurse who brought back my baby was deaf to me and wasn’t concerned,” Serrano told RTL France. “It was negligence; something that shouldn’t happen in a job with such responsibilities. Nobody has the right to make such mistakes.”

The family of the second girl, who came from the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion, was traced and a meeting was arranged. “It was a pretty disturbing moment,” said Manon Serrano, one of the now grown-up girls, after a civil court hearing in December. “You find yourself in front of a woman who is biologically your mother, but who is a stranger.”

Today, the families have no contact except through lawyers bringing the case. “We tried to forge a link, to find a place for the other in the lives of our respective families, but it didn’t work, Sophie Serrano said in December. “It was too difficult, so we each went our separate ways. It’s too upsetting. It was the only way to find a kind of stability.”

After a criminal action against the clinic was dropped, the families decided to sue in the civil courts. The case was heard by judges in December. On Tuesday, the court awarded €400,000 to each of the young women who had been swapped at birth, €300,000 each to three of the parents, and €60,000 to three siblings, a total payout of €1.88m.

Although the payout was substantially less than the €12m demanded by the victims, it was an unusually high award for a French court. Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for one of the families, said they were completely satisfied with the decision and there was no question of an appeal.

The family of the second young woman have not been publicly named.

Lawyers for the clinic said they were waiting for details of the judgment before making a decision about whether to appeal. A spokesperson blamed the mixup on a staff member who had been found to be a “chronic alcoholic”. However, the clinic has expressed surprise that it took the families a decade to make their concerns over the children public – a reaction Sophie Serrano said was “below the belt”.

“It has just made me more angry and more determined to see them punished,” she said in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur magazine. She said for years she had suffered accusations that Manon, with her darker skin and hair, was the postman’s child.

Serrano said she hoped the case would ease the guilt she felt and encourage parents to speak up if they had concerns. She told Le Point magazine: “I was 18 years old, I was young and tired. Manon was my first child … and the guilt – if I had insisted, if I had asked more questions.”

She said nothing would separate her from Manon. “Our relationship is more than close. We were so afraid to lose one another that we realised how much love we have for each other. We don’t need the same blood to feel part of the same family.”



















