Baby Swap

What a funny story. Two babies were accidently switched in a California hospital this weekend. Not until Linda Boggeri got home and snipped off the name-tag bracelet on the child she thought was her own, did she realize that it was Chloe Amzallag, not her child Meagan in her arms.

Think of the poor hospital officals calling up the Amzallags and telling them about the switch up. Guffaw, guffaw. And then the two families quietly ushered into a private room at the hospital to exchange infants they thought were they're own.

Chortle, chortle, gulp, hem. It gets less funny the more it sinks in. The what-ifs start to add up. Back when people lived in caves baby identification was easy--there was only one baby per cave at a time and no plexiglass to shield worried parents from maternity wards piled high with anonymous bawling infants.

Only Linda Boggeri, who happened to read the name on the bracelet as she was putting it in a scrapbook, realized that the switch had occured. The other family was oblivious. What if Mrs. Boggeri hadn't read the name in her scrapbook for three years, or five, or 11. What to do then?

As it was, when the hospital called the Amzallags they were unwilling to believe what had happened. "I told my wife not to worry, it must be a joke," Andre Amzallag said. They didn't want to believe it.

Neither do any of us. How horrible to think that the routinization of modern life has penetrated even into the hospital delivery ward and that babies become like so many home appliances rolling off the assembly line, one after another. Blase orderlies careen around the maternity ward sorting the newborns--different colors sometimes, but basically interchangeable.

Interchangeable. Compatibility is what we call it now. We used to wonder whether a certain pair of people might be compatible, now the question is whether the serial ports on the back of one's computer will match with those on a modem. Of course there was no hardware compatibility problem with the babies. Linda Boggeri was able to breast feed Chloe Amzallug without mishap.

THE ODD INCIDENT aside, babies are in no immediate danger of becoming just another mass-produced consumer item.

But give it some time. Undoubtedly, there are people out there who were switched as children. Their biggest gamble--playing Rawlsian roulette and ending up with an arbitrary allotment of wealth and family love--could really have nothing at all to do with their heredity or genetic endowment, but just a hospital shell game.

And what if Mrs. Boggeri didn't catch the hospital's mistake, what if four years later the child she brought home died? Looking in the scrapbook she discovered the bracelet and realized the babies had been switched. Would she then be entitled to get her real daughter back from the Amzallags, claiming genetic defect?

The first-ever baby recall.