Boxes
where parents can leave an unwanted baby, common in medieval Europe, have been
making a comeback over the last 10 years. Supporters say a heated box,
monitored by nurses, is better for babies than abandonment on the street - but
the UN says it violates the rights of the child.
It is an unlikely scene for the
most painful of dramas. On the edge of a road in a leafy suburb of Berlin,
there is a sign pointing through the trees down a path. It says
"Babywiege" - Baby Cradle. At the end of that path, there is a
stainless steel hatch with a handle. Pull that hatch open, and there are neatly
folded blankets for a baby. The warmth is safe and reassuring. There is a
letter, too, telling you who to call if you change your mind. About twice a
year, someone - presumably a woman - treads that path at the secluded rear of
Waldfriede Hospital and leaves the baby, perhaps born in secret only a few
hours earlier. That person - presumably the mother - then turns and walks away,
never to see the baby again. The baby grows, but never gets to know who his or
her mother was. The word "presumably" is used because the process is
secret and anonymous, so nobody knows who the people are who make that walk,
carrying a baby to reverse their steps without one. So one of the arguments
made by those who condemn the system is that it may well be men who are giving
the baby away, dumping him or her seems too hard a word. The critics say that
baby boxes may be used by unscrupulous fathers or even controllers of
prostitutes to put pressure on mothers to dispose of an unwanted baby. The
psychologist, Kevin Browne of Nottingham University told that
"Studies in
Hungary show that it's not necessarily mothers who place babies in these boxes
- that it's relatives, pimps, step-fathers, fathers. "Therefore, the big
question is: are these baby boxes upholding women's rights, and has the mother
of that child consented to the baby being placed in the baby box?" Professor
Browne continued: "The baby hatch is so anonymous, and so removed from the
availability of counselling, that it creates a damage and a danger to the
mother and child." On this argument, by making it so easy to get rid of a
baby, mothers are less likely to get the real help they need in their situation
of great emotional trauma and even physical risk. It is an argument the people
who set up baby boxes reject. They say, rather, that they are offering
desperate mothers a safe way to get rid of their unwanted babies. Those who
don't walk the path to the baby box might instead leave the baby in the biting
cold of a public place. Or worse. A court case has just finished in Germany
where a mother was prosecuted for killing her baby by throwing it from a
fifth-floor balcony. This kind of case is giving a push to the movement for
more baby boxes across Central and Eastern Europe, from the Baltic states, down
through Germany, Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, to Romania. The
law in some countries encourages their spread - in Hungary, for example, it was
changed so that leaving a baby in the official baby box was deemed to be a
legal act amounting to consent to adoption, while dumping a child anywhere else
remains a crime. Professor Browne thinks that the spread is greatest in
countries with a communist past (and so an attitude that the authorities will
take over child-rearing) or in Catholic countries where the stigma of unmarried
motherhood is stronger. He did much of the unpublished research on which the UN
Committee on the Rights of the Child relied in its assessment of the system. It
believes that children have a right to know who their parents are and that
right is denied to the foundlings left in baby boxes. The proponents don't
accept that for a moment. Gabriele Stangl, of Waldfriede Hospital in Berlin,
said that baby boxes save lives, and so increase rights.
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