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Baby hatches hit headlines
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DESPERATE unwed mothers are not the only women disposing of newborn babies.
Many parents abandon infants with congenital problems and disabilities because they cannot afford to care for them.
Many children in orphanages are not actually orphans — they have been abandoned.
To deal with this problem, 25 baby hatches or so-called “children’s safe islands” have been set up in 10 provinces around China. There is none in Shanghai and no plans to open one for fear it will encourage abandonment.
At the baby hatches, mothers can anonymously leave babies who will be cared for.
Only a small fraction are healthy children left by unwed mothers.
Most have serious congenital problems, but 90 percent can survive with proper treatment.
The hatch is a small room equipped with an incubator and an alarm. After a baby is left in the incubator, the alarm is triggered, alerting staff in the adjacent facility. Personnel check regularly throughout the night.
Baby hatches hit the headlines and became a source of controversy this month when one was temporarily closed because it was overwhelmed with babies at the Guangzhou Social Welfare Institute in Guangdong Province.
The facility had only been open for 50 days and had received 262 babies. Until it expands, it will only accept babies sent by police.
The question is whether such facilities actually encourage parents to abandon children and avoid responsibility, or whether they increase children’s chances of survival.
The debate has been ongoing since the first “safe island” was set up in 2011 at the Shijiazhuang Social Welfare Institute in Hebei Province. Similar hatches were opened in Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Guizhou and Guangdong provinces. Most are still operating.
The shelter in Shijiazhuang received around 180 babies in the past two and a half years. The one in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, has received 137 babies in its first 100 days; that’s about the same number taken in by the entire shelter in the past. It is not the intention to pave the way for parents to abandon children with disabilities, said Zhu Shucui, vice president of the Nanjing Social Welfare Institute.
“These ‘safe islands’ are about the supremacy of life. They provide shelter for babies when abandonment is inevitable,” she said.
“Abandoning babies is illegal and the priority is to prevent it. The safe islands aim to cope with the problem when the law is broken,” said Li Bo, director of the China Center for Children’s Welfare and Adoption.
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