Apparently those babies switched at birth stories aren't just the stuff of urban myth.
Back in 1998, two twelve-year-old girls in eastern Russia, born within 15 minutes of each other, were accidentally swapped.
Though the girls were raised just a few miles of each other in the town of Kopeisk in the Ural Mountains, they are polar opposites -- one Muslim, the other Christian.
The switcheroo was only discovered after the ex-husband of Yuliya Belyaeva, one of the mothers, questioned his paternity because his daughter Irinia "looked nothing like him".
Imagine the surprise when DNA tests came back, revealing that neither parent was biologically linked to Irinia.
“Suddenly my whole world turned upside down,'' Ms. Belyaeva told the BBC. “And I kept thinking about my real daughter. Maybe she’d been abandoned. Put in an orphanage. Or perhaps she was begging on the streets.”
With help from local authorities, Ms. Belyaeva tracked down records from the labour ward where she gave birth. That's how she found Anya, her biological daughter.
Now both families are suing the Kopeisk Maternity Hospital for more than $300,000 (U.S.) in damages.
So much for nature trumping nurture. In this case, both girls are happy to stay put, though they are glad to know one another.
That's more than can be said for the parents, however, who worry about how, with such radically different backgrounds, the girls will influence each other.
“There is tension between the adults,” Ms. Belyaeva said. “Naimat doesn’t like some things that go on in our family, I don’t like some things in their home. Both of us are used to life as it has been. Not as it is now. Now it is a nightmare.”
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