DNA test reveals possible baby swap at North Dakota hospital

Two years ago, Jeremy Morrison took a DNA test and learned the parents who raised him were not his biological parents. The discovery set off a family search that now reaches back to a hospital in Grafton, North Dakota, where Morrison believes he and Kyle Bylin were switched at birth on Jan. 26, 1988.

Morrison told KKTV that he had long felt different inside his own family, saying he was the blonde-haired child in a home full of brown-haired relatives. He said a DNA test taken by an aunt linked him to Bylin as her nephew, a result that led him to believe the two men had been handed to the wrong families at birth. Morrison also believes he and Bylin were the only babies born that day at the same hospital.

Morrison, Bylin and both sets of parents are suing Unity Medical Center. The case puts the hospital’s handling of a decades-old delivery under scrutiny and raises questions about how a birth mix-up, if it happened, could remain hidden for nearly four decades before a genetic test exposed it.

Unity Medical Center has denied the allegations and said it is trying to understand what happened. The hospital said medical and staffing records from that period no longer exist because nearly four decades have passed, and it said no members of the 1988 delivery team still work there. It also said it found no evidence that the hospital or its staff were responsible for any switch.

The dispute now sits at the intersection of identity, family ties and institutional memory. Morrison said both sets of parents have met their biological sons, but Morrison and Bylin have not yet met each other. For the families, the lawsuit is not only about what happened in one delivery room in Grafton, but also about the paper trail, staffing records and safeguards that should have existed then and what, if anything, remains to explain a possible mistake so old that the hospital says the records are gone.