It is an incredible story that of Ana and Maria (fictional names chosen by the newspaper The Rioja), which may not be the only one. The girls were born in 2002 on the same day – a day we do not know due to their request for anonymity – at the San Millán hospital in Logroño, a small town in the north of Spain.
Ana was born five hours before Maria but both weigh so little (Ana 2.2 kg and Maria 2.3 kg) that the hospital maternity managers decide to transfer them directly from the delivery room of the Neonatal Unit to the incubator room. By handing Ana to Maria’s parents and vice versa.
A human error that caused Mary a difficult life due to the disability and the inability of her “formal parents” to support her, so much so that in the end she was entrusted to the “presumed maternal grandmother”.
In 2017 Maria is 15 years old and her guardian, “the alleged grandmother”, asks her “alleged father” to pay him alimony but he refuses, arguing that it was not his daughter. An excuse, thinks the Magistrate Court of Logroño, who then orders the parent to undergo the DNA test, thus discovering the truth: the man was not the biological father.
It is at that point that Maria discovers that her mother too was not biologically such. And not even her maternal grandmother – with whom the young woman, now 19, continues to live – as well as her relatives.
For this reason, after requesting and obtaining the benefit of majority age at the Logroño Family Court, Maria turned to the Ministry of Health, the last responsible for what happened in the hospital, demanding “the ascertainment and determination of its unequivocal identification according to the principle of biological truthfulness “.
The Ministry, while declaring itself “technically and legally unable” to provide answers to these questions, opened an investigation with which Maria was able to reconstruct what happened from the moment of birth to the placement in the arms of the wrong mother. Before discovering, among other things, that his alleged biological parent died in 2018.
The mystery was solved thanks to the lawyer José Sáez-Morga with the collaboration of the Health Inspectorate of La Rioja, which studied the births registered in the San Millán hospital during 2002, excluding children who did not pass through the room the incubator; she left the males out and after analyzing dates, medical data and other elements, Ana’s medical history was found on the table next to Maria’s.
This is how the girl began her legal battle by asking the Ministry of Health for 3 million euros for the life full of difficulties she lived, but which should not have been hers. A negligence for which the ministry has offered to pay 215 thousand euros, at least until the DNA test confirms the biological relationship between Ana and her alleged father. An analysis sent to the National Institute of Toxicology in January 2021 that has not yet reached the Palace of Justice in La Rioja, even if Maria’s lawyer has no doubts about the outcome.