Two French families have been awarded nearly $2.13 million in damages for an accidental baby-swap of two girls nearly 20 years ago.

BBC News reports the swap was only discovered when one of the girls felt that she did not look like her father.

The court in Grasse in southern France ordered the clinic in Cannes, which accidentally switched the girls at birth, to pay them over $450,000 each in damages. Three of the parents were awarded about $340,000, and about $68,000 was given to three siblings each.

The families asked for six times more than the amount they received but chose not to appeal. Their lawyer said they were "relieved that the court had recognized the clinic was responsible."

One of the mothers, Sophie Serrano, said she gave birth to a baby girl in 1994, and the baby was placed in an incubator to be treated for jaundice. Both babies were being treated in the same incubator and then given to the wrong parents.

Serrano and her husband had tests done 10 years later, which revealed that neither of them were the biological parents of their daughter Manon.

Further investigation linked the two families together who eventually took the case to court but never wanted to switch the little girls back.

Sophie said she had hoped to win "recognition" for the case, "so as to free us from all this guilt about not having been able to protect your kid, not having insisted when we saw there was a problem," according to AFP.

Although the mix up was discovered nearly 10 years ago, neither family wanted to swap the girls back.

Manon Serrano described meeting the other family as "a pretty disturbing moment."

"You find yourself in front of a woman who is biologically your mother but who is a stranger," she said.

Both families have distanced themselves from each other.

Related