In Norway, two women were shocked to learn they had been switched at birth and only found out about the fiasco almost 60 years later, due to an alleged government cover-up.

The adult women, who are now both 59, teamed up with Karen Rafteseth Dokken – one of the mothers who received the wrong child – to sue the state over the switcheroo, reported the Associated Press.

Dokken had given birth to a baby girl on February 14, 1965, at a private institution in central Norway called Eggesboenes Hospital, where babies were kept together while mothers rested in separate rooms. A week later, she returned home with a baby, named Mona after her mother, who she assumed was her offspring.

Dokken found it odd that her daughter had black curls, but supposed she was taking a cue from her husband’s dark-haired mother and raising her as her own.

It was not until the turn of the millennium that she realized that Mona was not hers and that her real daughter, Linda Karin Risvik Gotaas, was being raised by someone else.

She would have found out sooner if Norwegian health authorities, who discovered the incident in 1985 when the girls were teenagers, had not covered it up, the AP reported.

“I never thought that Mona was not my daughter,” Dokken, now 78, said through tears during his testimony at the Oslo District Court on Tuesday.

The situation was particularly difficult for Mona, who only discovered that Dokken was not her biological mother in 2021, after taking a DNA test at the age of 57.

In the recent case, the women all claimed that Norwegian authorities had violated their rights and undermined their right to family life, for which they owed the trio an apology and compensation.

Lawyer Kristine Aarre Haanes, representing Mona, said the state “violated her right to her own identity all these years,” adding that “they kept it secret.”

“His biological father is deceased,” added the lawyer. “She has no contact with her biological mother.”

Interestingly, the woman who raised Dokken’s biological daughter had learned the truth much earlier in 1981, but neglected to pursue her maternity case.

Meanwhile, Norwegian health authorities are fighting back, citing the fact that the 1965 exchange occurred at a private institution in the 1980s, when they did not have the authority to alert other families of the calamity.

It is not yet clear why this exchange took place in the first place; however, reports suggest that this was one of several infant changes that occurred at Eggesboenes in the 1950s and 1960s.