North Dakota men sue hospital over alleged baby switch at birth
A DNA match on an ancestry website led Jeremy Morrison to a decades-old claim that Unity Medical Center sent home the wrong babies in 1988, triggering a six-person lawsuit.
A DNA test and an ancestry website brought Jeremy Morrison to a question hospitals rarely face so publicly: how could a birth switch remain hidden for nearly four decades, and what records failed to catch it? Morrison and Kyle Bylin, both born on Jan. 26, 1988, at Unity Medical Center in Grafton, North Dakota, are now suing the hospital along with their parents, alleging that the two infants were switched at birth and sent home with the wrong families.
Morrison says the discovery came after his aunt’s DNA matched a man named Kyle Bylin as her nephew. He has also said he long felt different from the family that raised him, noting that he was a blonde-haired child in a family of brown-haired relatives. The men were born just hours apart, and the complaint says they were the only two babies born at the hospital that day.
The lawsuit names Christian Unity Hospital Corporation, which did business as Unity Medical Center, and it includes six plaintiffs: Morrison, Bylin, Evelyn Newton, Keith Bylin, Elizabeth O’Toole and Terry Morrison. The claims include negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, deceit and medical malpractice. The plaintiffs are seeking more than $50,000 in damages and a jury trial in Walsh County District Court.
The hospital denies the allegations. In its response, it says records from 1988 no longer exist and that no one from the delivery team that handled births that year is still employed there. The hospital has also argued the case may be barred by the statute of limitations and asked the court to dismiss it with prejudice.
The case shows how consumer genetics is rewriting old family histories while also exposing the limits of paper and electronic recordkeeping in medicine. A DNA match that began with one family’s online search has now turned into a legal fight over what happened in a North Dakota delivery room on a January day in 1988, and whether the institution involved can still be held accountable.
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