A refuge for unwanted babies is necessary in every city

The cardboard coffin was a little bigger than a shoe box, bound with rope and tape. Stuffed with a dead baby girl wrapped in plastic, the box was dumped 80 feet from the southbound lanes of the Antelope Valley Freeway which is a freeway in Los Angeles and Kern counties in southern California. The mother didn’t want her baby girl. In Hollywood, a newborn boy was wrapped in plastic and dropped into the trash behind the YMCA. The mother of that baby boy didn’t want her baby either. The body of a baby girl was thrown off a highway bridge over a river New Jersey by the baby’s father last year. He too didn’t want the baby. These three babies that were disposed of were three of approximately 12,000 babies abandoned each year in the United States alone.

While the practice has become less common in the Western world, multiple well known cases have been noted in the media—including those of Andrea Yates who drowned her children, Sabine Hilschenz who killed eight of her children and, most recently, Véronique Courjault, who was found to have frozen her infants to death.

Fear of being ostracized drives some women to kill or abandon their children. They regard being pregnant as being shameful, or fear that they will be rejected by their families. Most often, the women are poor, homeless, in an abusive relationship, are HIV-infected or have a mental illness or drug addiction drug addiction or other form of chemical dependency.

On the garbage dumps that surround Beijing, scavengers from time to time will find a newborn baby girl amid the stinking refuge. Sometimes the girls are still alive. They have been abandoned by their mothers because boys are more valuable as family members in China; a country that has a strict policy of couples being permitted to only have one child in order to reduce China’s expanding population. Chinese society is throwing away its little girls at an astounding rate. For every 100 baby girls registered at birth, there are now 118 baby boys --- in other words, nearly one seventh of Chinese girl babies are going missing. Tens of thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year in China. Recent studies suggest that over 40 million girls and women are 'missing' in China.

This practice has been going on around the world for centuries. In the Eastern Shoshone in the United States, there was a scarcity of Indian women as a result of female infanticide. In the region known today as southern Texas, the Mariame Indians practiced infanticide of females on a large scale.

The Tapirapé indigenous people of Brazil allowed no more than three children per woman. Furthermore, no more than two had to be of the same sex. If the rule was broken infanticide was practiced. The people in the Bororo tribe killed all the newborns that did not appear healthy enough. Infanticide is also documented in the case of the Korubo people in the Amazon.

In November 2008 it was reported that in Agibu and Amosa villages of Gimi region of Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea where tribal fighting in the region of Gimi has been going on since 1986 (many of the clashes arising over claims of sorcery) women had agreed that if they stopped producing males, allowing only female babies to survive, their tribe's stock of boys would go down and there would be no men in the future to fight. They agreed to have all new-born male babies killed. It is not known how many male babies were killed by being smothered, but it had reportedly happened to all males over a 10 year period and probably was still happening.

In Senegal women who become pregnant outside of marriage --- their husbands living abroad --- commonly kill their babies out of fear and shame. Husbands’ absence is one of many factors contributing to infanticide in Senegal, where many young women with unwanted pregnancies see eliminating the child as their only option. Abortion is illegal in Senegal and clandestine abortion is also common. Poverty, sexual promiscuity and ignorance about contraception are other factors, but the common thread is severe shame around unplanned pregnancy particularly by extramarital relations

On April 1, 1856, at the request of philanthropists and officials of the city of Baltimore, three Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul from Emmitsburg, Maryland, undertook the care of neglected and unwanted babies in a little rented house at 293 Druid Hill Avenue. The first child, a 3-year-old girl, was admitted on April 10, 1856. The need for such a service was clear. During the first year, 50 children were admitted for care. With the number of admissions increasing, the institution moved in March, 1857, to a larger, but temporary location on Pratt Street.

New York built a foundling hospital (called the Infant’s Home, it was attached to the Nursery and Child’s Hospital), and it, along with three others, the New York Infant Asylum, the New York Foundling Asylum, and the Randall’s Island Infant Hospital, which opened after the American Civil War.

The Foundling Hospital in London, England was founded in 1739 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram. It was a children's home established for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.

Of course, these three institutions weren’t the first refuges for unwanted babies in the world. The practice had been going on for centuries. In the city of Rome, for instance, undesirable infants were abandoned at the base of the Columna Lactaria, so named because this was the place the state provided for wet nurses to feed some of the abandoned children. It was common knowledge in Europe for centuries that unwanted babies could be left at churches or nunneries.

‘The Door of Hope’ orphanage, 48 Hillbrow Street in Berea, Johannesburg, is the only place in South Africa and possibly in the world that has what is known as "a hole in the wall baby bin’. Here, mothers who don't want their newborn babies can place them in the hole anonymously and leave without any questions being asked. The Door of Hope orphanage and the baby bin were established six years ago in an effort to prevent mothers from abandoning their babies in alleys and rubbish bins where the babies for the most part, died. Since its establishment, 60 babies have been placed in the baby bin and 885 babies have been taken in by the orphanage. Once a baby has been placed in the bin, sensors alert the staff that a baby has been placed in it. The staff then take the baby for a medical check-up to see if he or she is healthy. The orphanage then tries to track down the mother through newspaper ads in hopes that the mother will take her baby back. If there is no response, then the baby is placed in the orphanage or alternatively, adopted by a family.

A Vancouver, British Columbia hospital is now adopting a centuries-old tradition of churches having a ‘foundling wheel’ where mothers could leave their unwanted babies. The mother is given 30 seconds to place the child in the hatch and get away before an alarm alerts staff that a baby has been left in the hatch. In fact, the police have agreed not to watch for mothers abandoning their infants to the hospital. If a baby is at a hospital, its life isn’t in danger, thus its mother hasn’t committed an illegal act. The mother has freed herself from a burden she feels she cannot handle, yet the baby does not physically suffer. No effort will be made by the hospital staff to locate the infant’s mothers. The infants will later be put up for adoption.

Many countries have similar procedures for the recovery of unwanted babies. There should be hospitals like the one in Vancouver everywhere that offer this service to mothers and their unwanted babies

My mother was raped in January 1933 and as a result, I was born in October of that year. I wasn’t aborted and I didn’t end up dead on a rubbish heap and my mother didn’t abandon me. Had I been disposed of as a dead infant like thousands of infants who had mothers around the world who had unwanted pregnancies, certain events in history would not have occurred. For example, it was I that proposed in a UN crime conference in 1980 that a bill of rights for young offenders be created. That bill of rights was adopted by the UN five years later and has an effect on the lives of millions of children world-wide. It was I that suggested at a crime conference in Canada that Legal Aid should have 24-hour duty counsel on call so that anyone arrested in Canada at any time of the day or night has access to free legal advice while in the police station. I am mentioning these two events to point out that all human beings have some role to play in our society and shouldn’t be killed as infants simply because they are unwanted.

It’s ironic when you think about it. Many years ago I was driving home on a motor scooter early in the morning. I was on a highway heading south towards Toronto and the moon was out so I turned off my headlight as the moon lit up the countryside. Up ahead, I saw about a mile away, a turn in the highway. I remembered that turn when I was heading northward days earlier. There was a cliff at the beginning of the turn. Suddenly I saw a bright light in my face and heard the blaring of a loud horn. I stopped my motor scooter and much to my horror, I discovered that I had driven the mile towards the cliff while I was asleep. My eyes were open while I was driving towards the cliff but I was totally unconscious as to where I was or what I was doing. It was no different than sleepwalking.

A truck driver stopped his rig and he called out and asked me if I was alright. I told him I was so he climbed back into his rig and drove away. I realized that it was his headlights that flashed before me and his horn that I heard. He obviously saw me heading towards the cliff rather than continuing on the turn. If he hadn’t been at that location at that precise moment and warned me of what I was doing, I would have driven off the cliff and been killed. If that had happened, none of what I had accomplished after that would have come about. What is ironic about this event is that the truck driver has no idea that his actions had an effect on the lives of millions of children around the world who are protected by the UN bill of rights for young offenders. Had he been aborted or killed as an unwanted baby and discarded onto a garbage heap, I would have been killed that fateful night and nothing I did after that would have occurred.

I have said it before and I will continue saying. Everyone’s life has an effect on the lives of other people. If you doubt that, then ask yourself this rhetorical question; “Would I exist today if my mother or my father were killed as an infant because they were unwanted?”