Mother’s instinct – it is strong. One mother had a strong instinct that the baby she took home from the hospital was not her biological baby. Everyone told her it was her baby, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that this baby was not the same baby she gave birth to.

Mercy Casanellas gave birth to her son via C-section in El Salvador. After her baby was born, she was shown the baby and was able to give him a kiss before he was taken to the nursery while she recovered. The next morning, her baby was brought back to her, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t the same baby. No matter how many doctors or nurses reassured her that this was in fact her baby, she still didn’t feel confident that this was the same baby she kissed the night before. 

Casanellas and her husband, Richard Cushworth, took the baby home and raised him as their own, yet Casanellas still wasn’t confident that it was really her baby. At the time, Cushworth completely believed that the baby was their child, but now, in retrospect, he realizes the baby they brought home looked nothing like them.

Without telling her husband, Casanellas decided to get a DNA test to find out if the baby was really their biological child. She felt like the DNA test would help her let go of the feeling that this wasn’t her baby and would prove to her that she was really his mother. Instead, the DNA test confirmed her suspicion. It revealed that there was a 0.0% chance she was the mother.

The discovery that the baby they had brought home and named Jacob was not their biological baby was traumatic for both parents. Cushworth explained, “Our hope in the beginning was that we would find our real child but we would also be able to keep the one that we had raised for three months.”

Cushworth and Casanellas told BBC News their story. Watch the video below to find out how they ended up being reunited with their biological son.

Even though Casanellas claims that Moses adjusted to his new home and accepted his birth parents as his real parents right away, it turns out that’s not entirely true. She later explained that it took a whole 18 months before he actually treated her like she was his real mother.

One day when she was dropping her son off at nursery school, he clung onto her not wanting her to leave, that’s when she cried tears of joy because he had never reacted to her that way before. She knew in that moment that he really accepted her as his mother.