What could be worse for a mother than to find out, as American mother Paula Johnson has done, that the bubbly three-year-old who brightens your days is not the baby to which you gave birth? That there is another child out there, who may look more like you, who grew in your womb for nine months and who is now being brought up by a stranger? Perhaps because it is a fundamental human dread, the concept of the baby stolen at birth and switched to other parents is embedded deep in our folklore. It is the foundling on the doorstep, the fairy child or baby princess given to the deserving but barren poor, the prince and the pauper.
Invariably the fable has an element of horror, but the horror comes from the reversal of the natural order, not the psychological trauma of the poor parents. In most of these romances, all comes right when the child's real identity is discovered years later. The ragged urchin's blue blood is undeniable in the end. In modern life the endings are never that clean and simple. When baby switches occur they set off a tangling of the threads of affection, identity and possession that can never be completely unravelled.
The child Paula Johnson has raised, Callie Marie, is now three. Most of what Callie Marie now is, in terms of the way she speaks and behaves and what she knows and cares about, comes not from her biological mother, but from Paula Johnson.
The instinct of Johnson, an American single mother who discovered the truth when her ex-boyfriend demanded a DNA test in a dispute over maintenance payments, is to keep Callie Marie, the child she has loved and bonded with. But now she knows Rebecca Chittum, her biological child, is living elsewhere in Charlottesville - and has recently, tragically, lost in a car accident both the parents who brought her up. And she cannot dismiss her from her mind or emotions. She wants to see her and visit occasionally, she has said.
Parents of baby-switch children are inevitably pulled both ways - by the attachment to the child they hold, and the potential of the child they should have had. It happened that way to two single mothers in South Africa, who discovered when their toddlers were 18 months old that they had been accidentally swapped over at birth.
Again, the truth came to light through DNA testing over maintenance payments. Margaret Clinton-Parker from Maritzburg and her former partner found their blood was unrelated to that of their child Gavin. Her real son, by then called Robin, was living with another single mother, Sandy Dawkins, in Nigel, 30 miles from Johannesburg.
The mothers did not want to exchange children, but the court case they brought for compensation showed how devastated each had been by the chance discovery. "I love Gavin too much to give him up," said Clinton-Parker, who had breastfed him for 10 months before returning to work. "Yet I feel this incredible bond with my own child. I am always wondering how he is, what he is doing, what he might feel one day when he learns I gave him up. I have this terrible anxious sense of guilt and confusion about the whole affair."
Some children have been returned to their biological mothers after a mix-up - but usually only very tiny babies. It happened in Southampton in the UK in 1992. Carla Marie Bursey and Gemma Coyle were put in the wrong hospital cots. The mistake was discovered three days later, when the Burseys found an ankle tag with the name Coyle on the child they thought was their daughter Carla. The babies were returned to their biological parents after blood tests made it absolutely certain, but both sets of parents said they were still attached to the child they had taken home, and were very distressed by the experience. Those first, innocent days with the new baby could never be relived.
But at least there is no damage to the infant, according to David Messer, professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. "Most of the literature on adoption and separation suggests that until the child is six to eight months, if they get a new carer they don't actually go through the sequence of protest and crying and despair and apathy which occurs after this age." Newborn babies do, instinctively, react to their real mothers. Hers is the voice they have heard while in the womb and they quickly show a preference for the mother's smell. There is some evidence to show that they prefer to look at their mother in the first 24 hours after birth. But it appears that the attachment they form so early to the person providing life-supporting food and comfort can be transferred to another.
As we get older, however, we are less able to throw off the past. The saga of Kimberly Mays is a graphic illustration of the way these traumas can affect an older child. She found out when she was 10 that she was a baby-switch child. In the years following that discovery, she shuttled back and forth between the law courts, two family homes, and a home for disturbed children.
The story began in 1978, when Robert Mays and his wife, now dead, took home their baby from the Hardee Memorial Hospital in Wauchula, Florida. Around the same time, Ernest and Regina Twiggs set off for a happy family life with baby Arlena. The families lived just around the corner from each other, but until Arlena Twigg died, aged 10, of a heart complaint nobody knew she was the Mays' biological child.
Robert Mays had brought up Kimberly on his own after his wife's death. He told of the dreadful moment when he had to tell her he was not her real father. "I was scared to death, it was like defusing a time bomb. After she listened to me she was scared. She just looked at me and said, "Will I have to move away?" I told her, "Whatever happens, I'm always your Dad."
Mays only agreed to genetic testing after the Twiggs, who already had seven children of their own, promised not to seek custody of Kimberly. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it would not go back in.
It all came to a head when Kimberly was 14. She left Mays to live with her biological parents, but did not find whatever she was looking for. She went to court and told a judge she wanted to return to the man who had brought her up. She said she could not stand her real parents: "I want them out of my life. I want my life back," she said. She was given the legal right to have nothing more to do with her biological parents. At the end of an eight-day trial, the judge said the Twiggs should no longer have any contact with her and confirmed Mays as Kimberly's real father - although the Twiggs declared they would continue to seek custody of the girl she was 18. All seemed well. Kimberley and Mays were pictured walking hand in hand along a beach in August 1993. But the following March, Kimberly ran away from him. A social worker said she was having nightmares and had cracked under the strain of her extraordinary situation. She is now once again with the Twiggs.
Courts usually recognise that it is in the child's best interest to stay with the parents who brought them up, in spite of biology. A woman in Georgia, in the USA, Jodie Denise Paul, took her battle all the way to the Supreme Court, but lost in the end in spite of an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. She kept Cameron, the son who was not biologically hers, and adopted him. But she was desperate to have back Melvin Moore, her biological child who had been adopted by Edith and Eugene Moore.
"It is very difficult for the parents," says Judy Wenban-Smith, a Birmingham psychologist. "They have assumed this child is theirs and invested in the child in terms of attachments and they learn to see the child as their own." If the child looks or acts nothing like them, she must be a throwback to Auntie Mary. "They would have incorporated the child into members of their family. They will in any kind of normal situation have developed a very profound bond."
With genetic testing for parentage becoming more common as a means for people of both sexes to dispute maintenance payments, it seems reasonably likely there will be more revelations of switched babies. Sadly, as the story of Kimberley Mays shows all too well, these modern fables do not always end happily ever after.