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It's especially important because Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and anything you write here, such as a name that could be used as a search term about the person, you're tying this article to that person, possibly for the rest of their life or, if they are recently dead, to their memory for the lives of their kith and kin.

So please don't unnecessarily add the names of private individuals in this work. Particularly, don't add the names of children. Our works are fully referenced so that if someone needs to know the name to ensure that they aren't double-counting they can follow the references. That's the only reason we'd need names in this work, which is about the phenomenon, not the people. -- Tony Sidaway 22:35, 6 June 2007 (UTC) reply

There is a move request that may affect this page; see Talk:Switched at Birth#Requested move to make way for disambiguation. Please comment there. Powers ^T 12:05, 15 July 2011 (UTC) reply

"On December 5, 2012, a baby from Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Apple Valley, Minnesota was sent to the wrong mother while his biological mother slept. It was reported that the night nurse was supposed to bring the child to the nursery and instead he ended up with the wrong mother. Despite the woman insisting the blonde child was not hers, she was reassured that she was "just tired". By the time the baby's ID bracelet was checked and the mix-up was revealed, the baby, named Cody, had already been breastfed by the wrong mother. The mistake caused both mothers and child to require HIV and hepatitis testing." < This doesn't make sense. Did one mother have hepatitis, while the other is HIV positive?? Or, was one already proven to have those, thus the sentence is entire erroneous, because then it only caused the other mother, and possibly the baby (if the non-mom was the infected one) to be tested, not all three. Or, did they test them despite no one had anything?? Or, did the guilty nurse inject drugs into the baby, and was on drugs at the time, and had reasonable suspicion of having hepatitis, and/or HIV?? There's no clarity to the sentence of how this could cause all three to get tested! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.19.247.182 ( talk) 05:56, 25 February 2014 (UTC) reply

Want to add two new examples, but I want to leave it here for discussion first:

• The case of the Bogotá mix-up brothers: [1]
• The case of a baby in El Salvador: [2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andresgoens ( talk • contribs) 18:33, 17 September 2015 (UTC) reply

"In real life, such a switch occurs rarely.[1] Since many cases of babies switched at birth are likely undocumented or unknown, the following is presumably not an exhaustive list."

According to my research:

"It is has been reported by different studies that 100,000 to 500,000 newborns are accidentally switched at birth every year -- and given to wrong parents! According to the 1998 Edition of the Tanderberg Report, (an annual medical study by sociologist Dr. Morton Tanderberg, and as reported by Ann Victoria in Weekly World News, p. 22, on 9-8-98), 500,000 or 1 out of every 8 babies born in American hospitals is sent home with the wrong parents. In many cases, these oversights are caught and corrected within a few days and the babies are returned to their mothers. But on the other end of the scale, Dr. Tanderberg says that in some overcrowded facilities, particularly in large metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the number of switched babies could be considerably higher -- possibly as high as 3 out of 8. This is probably why the tv soap operas and talk shows never run out of of "switched at birth" stories."

http://www.amfor.net/StolenBabies.html

One to three babies out of eight is huge, not rare by any means.

Pdworkman ( talk) 00:11, 19 March 2016 (UTC) reply

• Perhaps you don't realize that Weekly World News prints rubbish so they can laugh behind the backs of idiots who actually spend money to read it. E Eng 00:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC) reply

The actor Charles Laughton once appeared in a story about a ghost of a seventeenth-century lord of a castle who is haunting his presumed descendant, the modern day earl or duke. A man has been accused of poaching on the nobleman's estate, and he is about to be put on trial. The ghost is only laid to rest when it is discovered that he is not actually an earl at all, but rather the son of one of the farmers on the estate at the time, who was switched with the real nobleman's son over 300 years earlier. In other words, the current earl is not actually an earl at all. The man arrested for poaching is in fact the rightful Earl, and only after the switch is revealed in open court does the ghost disappear forever. The film is from 1943 and is called "Don't Take it to Heart." Glammazon ( talk) 06:45, 20 June 2018 (UTC) reply

The situation for the man born to the poor family would've been just as bad: as his foster parents never legally adopted him, he had no legal right to the family estate , and was only allowed to keep the family home and money because they'd left it to him in good faith. Glammazon ( talk) 21:19, 30 January 2020 (UTC) reply