The two newborn girls were mistaken for each other at a private hospital in Herøy in western Norway in 1965, and grew up completely unaware that they were not their parents' biological children.
The mix-up came to public attention in 2021 – when the women had turned 55 and one of them submitted a DNA sample to a genealogy site and received unexpected results, NRK reports.
Together with one of the mothers, the women then sued the state. The district court ruled in the state's favor last year, which has now also been ruled by an appeals court.
The court writes that the mix-up certainly had "significant and lifelong consequences for those involved", but also that there is nothing to show that the state as a superior authority has violated human rights.
"We are very, very disappointed," says Sølvi Nyvoll Tagen, one of the mothers' lawyers, to NRK.
The women have not yet decided whether to appeal the verdict. According to the lawyer, they are particularly disappointed with the verdict regarding a particular incident in the early 1980s.
Then one of the mothers discovered, after a blood test, that her daughter could not be her biological child. She contacted the authorities, but received no response.
After investigations, the Norwegian Directorate of Health concluded in 1985 that the children had been mixed up, but that they were living under "satisfactory social and material conditions" and thus the matter was shelved - without the families concerned being informed of what had happened. According to NRK, the state and the municipality agreed to keep the whole thing a secret.
