12 Year Old Girls Switched at Birth
I know this sounds like an ABC family plot, but for two families the idea of two girls switched at birth is a reality. Two Russian families are currently suing their local maternity hospital for giving them the wrong babies twelve years ago. 
This unsettling discovery only came about due to a divorce. When Yuliya Belyaeva divorced her husband earlier this year, he refused to pay alimony because he claimed he did not believe he was the father of their daughter, Irina. Yuliya promptly took him to court, where the judge ordered DNA tests. Much to everyone’s shock, the tests showed that neither her husband nor Yuliya were the biological parents of Irina. Even the judge was baffled who exclaimed that he had only seen cases like this on televisions shows and did not know how to properly advise the parents.
Thinking back to her delivery day in the hospital twelve years ago, Yuliya recalled there being one other woman in the labor ward. That’s when she realized that the hospital had made a terrible error and switched the babies’ name tags, placing them with the wrong parents. Investigators were able to locate the other family, living on the other side of town, and they too joined in the suit against the hospital. The parents and the two girls were in for quite a shock when they all met for the first time. Each girl looked exactly like the family she originally came from, explaining why their entire lives, they never resembled their parents. Yuliya commented, “Their daughter, Anya, was blond and looked just like me and my ex-husband. And our daughter was dark-skinned and had dark hair and looked like the other father.
He’s a Tajik, and she looked just like him.” Both families’ worlds were quickly turned upside down, however, both sets of parents cared for and loved the daughters they were given, and never fathomed that the hospital could make this big of a mistake. Both Anya and Irina announced that they wanted to continue living with their current families; Irina even begged, “Mum, please don’t give me away!” Yuliya assured her daughter that, “Nothing has changed. I’m still your mother.” While the families have been attempting to have the daughters occasionally visit their biological parents, it’s tough because both daughters were brought up completely different then their actual parents. Irina as a Russian Orthodox and Anya as a Muslim.
