A newborn girl left a Philadelphia-area hospital with the wrong family in late 2020, and by the time courts fully untangled what happened, judges decided it was too late to undo the mistake. The mix-up, which the city’s child-welfare agency later played down in court as a “misstep,” infuriated the baby’s kinship relatives and raised fresh questions about how hospitals and the Department of Human Services coordinate where vulnerable infants go when they leave the maternity ward.
According to court filings and reporting, the infant, referred to in legal proceedings as “Cora,” was born Nov. 7, 2020, at Lankenau Hospital, weighed about 3 pounds, 14 ounces, and tested substance-exposed. Philadelphia DHS had already identified cousin Renee Muth as the planned placement so the baby could live with three half-siblings, but instead the child was discharged to a different family. The timeline and those core facts are laid out in an investigation by North Penn Now, while transcripts from the court hearings are posted publicly on DocumentCloud.
In hearings, city lawyers did not try to sugarcoat the original discharge decision. They repeatedly told the court it was an error and insisted DHS was attempting to fix it. “The Department is here to state that that decision was a misstep. The Department has been taking measures to correct that misstep,” a DHS attorney told the judge at an early 2022 hearing, according to the official transcript. The February 2022 proceeding that includes those comments is posted on DocumentCloud.
What Judges Had To Weigh
Judges in the case repeatedly acknowledged that DHS got the initial placement wrong. The legal question in front of them, though, was whether to uproot a child who had already spent years bonding with the family that took her home from the hospital. At a March 31, 2022 hearing, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Allan Tereshko sharply criticized DHS over how the discharge was handled, then denied a petition that would have removed the girl from the household raising her. The final hearing in August 2024, along with subsequent appeals, are described in the reporting and court records as the point when judges concluded that the child’s attachments to her current home outweighed DHS’s original kinship placement plan. The transcripts and reporting behind those rulings are available through North Penn Now…