A South African couple were recently reunited with their long lost daughter, literally. Celeste Nurse’s baby girl Zephany was just three days when she was stolen and it would take 17 years before her family found her.

The woman who presumably abducted Zephany lived just miles away and so the girl ended up attending the same high school with her other biological younger sister. 

Good enough, they looked alike and soon enough, other students noticed the resemblance and the two sisters started talking and before long, their parents arranged for DNA tests and the baby snatcher is now in court to pay for her crime. I have no sympathy for her or anyone who abducts or kidnaps other people’s children. 

I don’t care if you can’t have children and think this is the only way for you to start a family. You can’t just snatch other people’s children. Can any of you imagine growing up with a different family as this girl did? 

We may all wish or wonder what it would be like to be raised by say richer parents or those of a different race, but that’s all it is, wishful thinking and very different from cases of people who illicitly take other people’s children. It’s an injustice that robs the unsuspecting child of time with their rightful parents who themselves are tormented for the rest of their lives wondering if their baby is live or not.

Imagine missing 17 years of your child’s life and it’s even longer for some unlucky parents who don’t get to see their children ever again. You miss the first smile, first words, first steps and all the other milestones parents dream of on account of someone else who thinks they deserve to have your child. 

There’s really no excuse given the many options for one to have a baby these days. With IVF, surrogacy and even good old adoption, anyone can have as many children as they want, legally. 

If you stole my baby and I caught you, I would see to it that you get a long prison sentence. It’s worrying that usually, birth attendants are complicit. I remember reading about two other intriguing cases: 

One where a White woman was handed a darker skinned baby. She had taken a good look at her newborn before nurses took the baby away on the pretext of conducting some tests only to return with a very different baby. She refused to be intimated and I think she and her husband had some connections and authorities were quickly notified and she got her baby back. 

Another case was a set of identical twins who were mixed up, and this is why I said earlier that I think some hospitals do it deliberately. In the latter case, a twin was swapped from each set and the parents said they did notice marked differences in their children but assumed it was normal. It took many years for the truth to unravel, thanks to Facebook. 

One of the twins stumbled upon a picture of a man who looked just like his brother except that he used a different name. He did his own investigation and all four brothers eventually got to meet. While these stories had happy endings, not all switched at birth or abduction stories do and there are many families that never get to see their "actual” children again, which is really unfair.