By Jonathan Landaw

For the past few weeks my wife and I have been following, as closely as we can, a particular news story. Because it involves such issues as personal identity, karmic and family relationships and the interplay of tragedy and compassion, I thought it might provide a suitable topic for this column. What follows, then, is as accurate and up-to-date a presentation of the main elements of this story as I can piece together; perhaps by the time this column is published some of the loose ends in this account may finally be tied up.

On July 4 of this year – the widely and wildly celebrated anniversary of American independence – a head-on car collision claimed the lives of seven people in Virginia, four of whom belonged to the same family. Such accidents are not at all uncommon, especially during American holidays when thousands upon thousands of families take to the highways. In fact, on average, more than 100 people die on American roads every single day throughout the year. As someone once remarked, it is as if the United States had entered into a Faustian pact with the Devil: in return for a truly extraordinary system of transportation, enabling masses of people to travel hundreds of miles a day – much further than most people in most countries, until recently, would have traveled in their entire lives! – we have agreed to the yearly sacrifice of 35,000 of our number.

But the story I am reconstructing here began three years before this tragic accident. (Whether or not we can fully justify the use of the word accident to describe such events is too large an issue to be addressed here.) It was then that Amanda A., one of the people who died in the car crash, was in the maternity ward at the University of Virginia Hospital giving birth to her daughter. On the same day and in the same ward another woman, Barbara B., was also giving birth. Each woman brought her daughter home, Amanda naming hers Annie and Barbara naming hers Betty. (I’ve changed all these names to make the story somewhat less confusing.)

Barbara’s relationship with her boyfriend Bill was not a smooth and easy one. According to court records, Bill began beating Barbara at least a year ago. Since then, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle of August 7, Barbara asked for and received a protective order keeping Bill away from her children, including Betty. Furthermore, next month Bill will face trial on another charge of assault and battery committed against Barbara. But it is what happened a month ago – within a few days of the accident that killed Amanda, the other mother – that really complicates the story.

Barbara had demanded more child support from Bill and, as is now routine in matters relating to paternity, they submitted to genetic testing to confirm the child’s parentage. These DNA tests not only showed that young Betty was unrelated to Bill, the supposed father, but she was also unrelated to Barbara herself! From a strictly genetic point of view, Mother B. and Baby B. were not, in fact, mother and daughter at all. How could this be? Was there something wrong with the DNA tests? Apparently not. In bitter parody of Gilbert and Sullivan, Barbara B. had taken home the wrong baby!

Since reports of these events first began to appear in the newspapers, each a day a new facet of the story has been revealed. Barbara B. remembered Amanda A. as the woman she had met on the maternity ward three years previously and, when she saw pictures of young Annie, she was overwhelmed by how much this child resembled her. So it did not take much to convince her what must have taken place in the hospital: the birth mother of the child she had been raising as her own was actually the now deceased Amanda, and the child the dead woman’s parents were now raising was actually hers.

If this seems confusing enough, consider the situation of the parents of the woman who died in the car crash. First they lose four members of their family, including their daughter, Amanda. Then, after they have assumed the responsibility of caring for their surviving grand-daughter, they hear that this child they have loved for three years might not be theirs after all, and that another girl – one they have never met – could actually be their deceased daughter’s child. They have been prey to so many powerful and sometimes conflicting emotions over the past few weeks – shock, loss, grief and disbelief – that it is entirely understandable for them to feel overwhelmed by events so far outside their control. In fact, up until yesterday they had resisted giving authorities permission to run a genetic test on Baby Annie, not wanting to give up hope that she was indeed related to them. Finally, however, they relented and the testing to confirm what most people suspect to be true – that the two babies were indeed switched at birth – should be completed soon.

But then what will happen? At the present moment, both Grandparents A. and Mother B. have expressed a great deal of sympathy and understanding for each other’s situation. As a spokesperson for Amanda’s family has stated, “We anticipate [that] privately the families, working together, will be able to solve the situation. The families are saying they want to do what is best for these two children.” However, whether this mutual concern and spirit of cooperation will survive the next set of DNA testing, to determine Baby Annie’s parentage, is uncertain. Conceivably, a bitter custody battle might break out, even thought here have been no reports so far that such a contest is desired by any of the principals.

But a sinister cloud is already hanging over this complex affair: hospital officials have emphatically declared that the baby switch – which they believe did indeed happen – was not their fault and could not have been an accident. They claim it was carried out purposely. So while members of the affected families are considering suing the University of Virginia for negligence in having allowed the hospital mix-up to take place, the officials themselves are denying any culpability whatsoever. Instead, they are declaring the switch was intentional and are awaiting the result of a police investigation so the person or persons responsible can be identified and prosecuted.

How all this will play out is anyone’s guess. But it certainly raises some complex questions (and I am not referring here to the strictly legal issues, which are formidable enough in themselves.) For example, what might cause a child to be born to one mother, raised by another who then dies in a car crash, be put into the care of grandparents, and then become a pawn in what might prove to be a highly complex custody battle? While it is true that we are biological entities, and that our identity is shaped by our parents’ genetic legacy, aren’t we more than what our chromosomes say we are? What is it, in fact, that determines which child belongs to which adult? And finally, how applicable is the notion of ownership or possession to the relationship between any two beings, human or otherwise? While I do not imagine that any of these questions can be settled in a court of law, in future columns I shall pass on to you, dear readers, whatever developments are significant enough to make it into the local newspapers.