DALLAS — After nearly nine months of waiting, a Dallas couple has arrived home with the baby that mom Mercy Casanalles gave birth to more than a year ago.
The ordeal for Rich Cushworth and his wife began when Casanalles, who was pregnant and living in the United States on a temporary visa, had to return home to El Salvador. She gave birth to their son in May 2015 via emergency cesarean section, and the child was whisked away to spend the night in the hospital's nursery.
When she was ready the next day to check out of Hospital Centro Ginecológico in San Salvador, nurses handed her a baby. But Casanalles, 39, didn't think the boy looked like the child she had held briefly the day before.
"It's been a long and painful process," Cushworth, 41, said after they returned Tuesday to the United States. "And I can't believe we have this beautiful miracle boy here in Dallas."
After the boy, whom they named Jacob, was given to them, they returned to their Dallas home. But though she loved Jacob, she kept thinking that he was not her biological son.
"When I got him, I said, 'This is not my baby,' " Casanalles said.
After a few months, she decided to have her DNA and Jacob's DNA tested. When the results came back, they showed a fraction of 1% probability that she had given birth to him.
"The thought that the baby I had been nursing, taken care of, loving him, bathing him — that he was not mine — and then I had another thought which came with it: Where's my baby?" Casanalles told the BBC. "So I had two thoughts: What's going to happen with this baby, and where's my baby?"
Worries about human trafficking began to gnaw at them.
The family returned to El Salvador, where investigators tracked down their biological child by ordering other new mothers to have their babies' DNA tested, according to the (London) Daily Mail. Cushworth is a native of West Yorkshire in England and met his wife at Christ for the Nations Institute, which trains missionaries, in Dallas.
Both boys, by then 4 months old, were returned to their biological mothers in September in San Salvador. But Casanalles and Cushworth had only an hour to say goodbye to Jacob before he was taken away.
"I think that was the most difficult part. We raised him like ours," Casanalles said. She told the BBC that she felt as if she were betraying Jacob even as she wanted to find the boy she gave birth to.
But the couple ran into a snag when the Salvadoran government wouldn't give their biological child, whom they named Moses, a birth certificate or passport to travel to the U.S. For more than eight months, they were at the mercy of the Salvadoran courts, an expense that has taken an extreme financial toll on the family.
Charges against the doctor who delivered the baby were dropped two weeks ago, according to the BBC.
The British ambassador to El Salvador, Bernhard Garside, helped through diplomatic channels.
"When we first got involved it looked very much like an uphill struggle," he told the BBC. "My fear was we weren't really going to see a happy conclusion to this."
The couple's lawyer, Shaun Naidoo, said baby Moses has only a three-week visa to stay in the United States, but the family has faith that their child will gain permanent residency.
"The story is if you stick to it there is a good ending to it," Naidoo said.
Follow Rebecca Lopez on Twitter: @rlopezwfaa
