Son stolen at birth hugs mother for first time in 42 years: ‘It knocked the wind out of me’
- Jimmy Lippert Thyden was born prematurely at a hospital in Santiago where his mother was told he had died and his body had been disposed of
- It’s estimated tens of thousands of babies, taken from impoverished Chilean families in the 1970s and 1980s, left the country never to return
Forty-two years ago, hospital workers took Maria Angelica Gonzalez’ son from her arms right after birth and later told her he had died. This month, she met him face-to-face at her home in Valdivia, Chile.
“I love you very much,” Jimmy Lippert Thyden told his mother in Spanish as they embraced amid tears.
“It knocked the wind out of me. … I was suffocated by the gravity of this moment”, Thyden said in a video call after the reunion. “How do you hug someone in a way that makes up for 42 years of hugs?”
His journey to find the birth family he never knew began in April after he read news stories about Chilean-born adoptees who had been reunited with their birth relatives with the help of a Chilean non-profit Nos Buscamos.
The organisation found that Thyden had been born prematurely at a hospital in Santiago, Chile’s capital, and placed in an incubator. Gonzalez was told to leave the hospital, but when she returned to get her baby, she was told he had died and his body had been disposed of, according to the case file.
“The paperwork I have for my adoption tells me I have no living relatives. And I learned in the last few months that I have a mama and I have four brothers and a sister,” Thyden said in the interview from Ashburn, Virginia, where he works as a criminal defence lawyer representing “people who look like me” who cannot afford a lawyer.
