Two 53-year-old women spent their lives at Springdale Cottage Hospital in Newfoundland and Labrador in the wrong family after birth complications in 1969.

On the morning of September 24, 1969, Ruth Lush gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Dora Arlene Lush after a cousin. While he was recovering in the hospital, his daughter was brought to him. To her surprise, Mrs. Lush doesn’t recognize her. It wasn’t the same baby she had petted the night before, she thought. But the sister immediately reassured him: Babies can change their clothes quickly. It was indeed her baby.

But as she got older, the differences between Dora Arlene and the other Lush children became clearer. Dora was redheaded and freckled while her sisters were blonde with milky skin.

For her part, the other, now grown baby, Caroline Weir-Greene, has always had concerns about her identity. Adopted by her aunt, she was too different from her cousins, who liked to mock her, telling her that her father might not be her real father.

With a head full of questions, one day she opened an email with the results of a genealogy kit she had created. So she saw that a list of surnames that had nothing to do with her current name came up. She also learned of the existence of one of her sisters somewhere in Halifax, with whom she rushed to get in touch. Her sister, who was actually Mrs. Lush’s eldest daughter, made the contact.

Ruth Lush was shocked. She learned that her birth daughter had been raised an hour away in a fishing village and that Dora Arlene’s birth parents had both died.

The story of the swap quickly spread through the community and others shared similar experiences at Springdale Cottage Hospital.

Joan Bugdell, for example, had a baby wrapped in a pink blanket delivered to her after birth. However, she had given birth to a boy. The nurse, initially skeptical, went off to investigate and eventually returned with her son.

The same applies to Jenetta Burton, who also gave birth to a daughter instead of the son she had given birth to a few hours earlier.

Back then, the only way to identify babies at birth in rural area hospitals was through the use of small, tagged bracelets that could be confused from time to time.

“I think these things can happen anywhere, but I’m really surprised to hear it happened there,” said Valerie Combden, a nurse working at Springdale Cottage Hospital at the time.

“I can’t imagine the trauma the parents went through. My deepest thoughts and prayers go out to them. It’s really awful,” she added.

Although cases of birth alternation are rare, they do not exist in Canada. In the 1970s, two separate cases were discovered at a federal hospital in northern Manitoba in 2015 and 2016.

In response, Health Canada offered free DNA testing for people born in the hospital during the period and ordered an independent investigation that found the changes were random and the result of failure to follow proper procedures.

Newfoundland Minister of Health and Community Services Tom Osborne offered his condolences to the affected families but did not apologize. He says he’s looking at what’s been done in Manitoba to see if it’s possible to do something similar in the Newfoundland case. However, he does not believe that an independent investigation is necessary.

That is not the view of progressive-conservative health critic Paul Dinn, who insists on families’ rights to know if this was an isolated case and whether the changes were intentional or due to a flaw in the system. “At least these families are entitled to an apology,” he said.