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Someone Else’s Twin: The True Story of Babies Switched at Birth
by Nancy L. Segal. Prometheus Books, 2011
In 1973 identical twins Delia and Begoña were accidentally separated in the Canary Islands hospital where they were born. Begoña went home with her parents and an unrelated baby, Beatriz, who was raised as her twin. Meanwhile, 50 miles away, Beatriz’s parents brought up Delia as their daughter.
Fast-forward 28 years, when a local store clerk mistakes Begoña for Delia. Convinced the two are twins, she arranges a meeting. The meeting fundamentally alters the sisters’ sense of identity—as well as that of their parents and siblings.
In Someone Else’s Twin, Nancy L. Segal delves into this extraordinary, tragic case to tackle both the scientific significance of identical twins and the humanistic questions they spark about identity. Segal, a fraternal twin and psychologist who directs the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, gained access to the women in exchange for acting as an expert witness in their lawsuit against the Canary Islands Health Services. Her position is clear: “Suddenly finding a twin in adulthood revises everything about one’s personal identity—who one is and who one should have been.”
She bolsters her position with findings from the 20-year Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, in which Segal was an investigator, and other research. Regardless of how they are raised, identical twins are more alike than fraternal twins in height, weight, health, intelligence, athleticism, social attitudes and job satisfaction, underscoring the influence of genes on these qualities. Indeed, the relationship between identical twins is so unique that a Spanish physician contended that Delia and Begoña’s separation violated their “fundamental right to personal identity.”
Segal describes how Beatriz, too, suffered a devastating loss when the switch was discovered. The twins’ parents also were shattered. Research on maternity certainty—a mother’s confidence that a child is her own—has shown that new mothers perform better than chance when trying to recognize their newborns within a couple of hours using senses other than sight; fathers are better at picking out their babies visually. Failing to spot a switch or to act forcefully on that instinct only adds to the grief of the new reality. “Saying your child has been switched,” the father of a switched pair tells Segal, “is like saying she’s been killed.”
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7 Comments
Add CommentYippee, a human interest story. On a science website.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find this article very sad.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing about the happiness of parents or children regardless of who they raised or who raised them.
And nothing about the main source of our frustration and sadness being our false polarized cultural preconceptions of "related" and "non-related" individuals and "ancestor or blood" identity, and nothing about the very tenuous results of the research on parents ability to "recognize their newborns".
n.b. I did not read the research on parent's ability to recognize their personal offspring but my understanding is that the methodology will always have way too much influence on the results.
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Sounds like a dishonest way to may big bucks quick.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's fake bonding, parents can't recognize their newborns until they get to know them. They can't even pick out their child the first time they see them.
Your right, who cares who brings you up, so long as they are good people. All this birth parent stuff, is irrational.
Takes no brains to a child. So many bad parents with kids is discouraging.
Steve Jobs is another good example. He says very little about his birth parents. They are not his REAL parents!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy best friend is so grateful that she was adopted by great parents. Did she look for the birth whatevers...NO!
This is not the place for these articles.
Addendum
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry. Just thinking out loud on related issues. I didn't realize I got so off topic, condescending, and cryptic .
There is no difference between human interest and science among humans. Your callusness is a clear indicator of something defective in your brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow would your children feel if you revealed that they were adopted as babies when they reached their mid twenties?
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