Two women from Austria, who were accidentally swapped at birth in a hospital in the southern city of Graz, have met for the first time after 35 years.
According to Kronen Zeitung, Doris Grunwald and Jessica Baumgartner were born in October 1990 at the LKH-Uniklinikum hospital in Graz. Both were premature babies, and shortly after birth, they were mistakenly switched and each was handed over to the other’s family.
In 2012, Doris Grunwald discovered that she was not the biological daughter of the parents who had raised her, Evelin and Josef Grunwald, when she was donating blood and realized her blood type did not match her mother’s.
The case became public in 2016 through the Austrian public broadcaster ORF, but at that time the other family could not be located.
Jessica Baumgartner had grown up not far away, with Herbert and Monika Derler, within the Graz region. She discovered that her blood type did not match her parents’ when she became pregnant, and her doctor informed her about the case of the two swapped babies in Graz.
Afterwards, Jessica contacted Doris through Facebook, and the two finally met in person, bringing closure to an unusual story that had begun more than three decades earlier.