Abandoned babies: ‘A good week
Moms who discard their newborns feel unsupported, often by the very professionals meant to counsel them
Warm. Drunken partygoers in stovepipe pants skulk against walls, waiting for the cold of the night air to give them a second wind. The smell of beer and sweat clings to the air.
The streets in Sunnyside, Pretoria, are buzzing — just before midnight on a Saturday.
It was about this time on an autumn evening in May 2015 that July Chitlango and his friend Thabiso decided to call it a night. They left the buzz of the bars and clubs on foot, and drew into a quiet part of the city near home.
But then Chitlango stopped abruptly. Frowning, he leaned forward and grabbed his friend’s arm. “Listen,” he breathed, eyes wide. Thabiso, alarmed by his friend’s sudden change of tone, started looking around frantically. “Molato ke eng?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Ssssssh,” said Chitlango. “There it is again.”
His eyes followed the sound to a nearby bush. Next to it, on the ground, an old blanket lay wrapped around something. There was a slight movement inside.
The two friends inched closer. Then they heard a baby crying.
Domen wearing weekend heels and fake lashes teeter out of smoky nightclubs, arm in
ee Blackie leans forward in her chair.
“The head of adoptions at Jo’burg Child Welfare told me that a good week is two children, and a bad week is around four,” she says, quoting the opening lines of her master’s thesis. “And this is just one child protection organisation. There always seems to be a baby being abandoned in Johannesburg.”
As part of her research, Blackie, who is also a founding member of the National Adoption Coalition of South Africa (Nacsa), phoned all the major child welfare offices across the country to find out how many babies are abandoned nationally every year. There are no official government statistics for this.
Child Welfare South Africa estimated that more than 3500 children were abandoned at their offices alone in 2010. This figure is what prompted Blackie to do her master’s research on this topic, to try to understand this growing challenge.
In 2017, Nacsa surveyed 26 privately run child and youth care centres, constituting roughly 10% of such organisations in the country. The results revealed that anonymous abandonments had increased as a percentage of total abandonments.
But the story behind the numbers is far more complex than mothers leaving infants at taxi ranks or discarding them in dustbins.
“The symptom is, yes, women end up having to neglect newborns or toddlers,” says doctor and advocate Tlaleng Mofokeng. “But the symptom is evidence of a range of systemic failures at all levels.”
Mofokeng is based in Johannesburg and has been a reproductive health doctor for 10 years.
“Why are women themselves neglected and still raising children on their own?” she asks. “The issues that are making women feel unprepared, unsupported and unable to raise a child remain.”
Abba Specialist Adoption and Social Services, a private adoption agency headed up by Nacsa chairperson Katinka Pieterse, conducts community training sessions aimed at addressing what Pieterse describes as “a blame thing”.
“The health and support workers view the mothers as irresponsible, sleeping around with many men, having no morals. But then in our training, we ask: ‘Does anybody plan this?’” she says.
“We ask them why do they think this really happened,” Pieterse explains. “And eventually we find the answers that are supported by research. Lack of support, lack of family care — in other words, unsustainable communities and families.”
About two-thirds of all pregnancies in South Africa are unplanned, according to a 2017 study published in the South African Medical Journal. Unplanned pregnancies are particularly common among young women, the research points out.
Although there appears to be a slow increase in the use of contraceptives countrywide, 42% of South African women don’t use birth control, according to Statistics South Africa.
Men’s use of contraceptives doesn’t look any better: Human Sciences Research Council’s data shows that more than half (52.9%) of male participants said they had never used a condom. Condom use had decreased from 85.2% among young men aged between 15 and 24 in 2008 to 67.5% in 2012.
Contraceptives are available for free at public health clinics but are often unobtainable — numerous studies have shown that health workers frequently discriminate against young, unmarried women who ask for contraceptives.
“We just feel ashamed but we don’t challenge them,” said one adolescent, speaking of the nurses who give her contraceptives at her local clinic. She was participating in a qualitative research study published in the journal Reproductive Health Matters in 2006. “Sometimes you may challenge them and find that you use words which may hurt them, then next time you go there, you find they refuse to help you.”
But access to contraceptives to prevent unplanned pregnancies isn’t the only problem — so is a person’s ability to use them and stay on them as needed.
“The power dynamics in a relationship where you are almost unable to negotiate for safe sex is common,” says Mofokeng. “Sometimes people say: ‘Well, you know, I’m buying the food in this house, I’m paying the rent here and I’ll have sex with you whenever I want.’”
South African women also fall prey to “reproductive coercion”, in that they “are almost forced to prove love and prove worth by falling pregnant and having kids”, Mofokeng says.
But some don’t use contraceptives simply because they don’t want to. “We need to acknowledge that people can choose not to be on contraceptives, though,” says Mofokeng. “And if they don’t want to, that’s also fine.”
In response to the spate of babies being abandoned, places such as Door of Hope have sprung up. In central Johannesburg’s Berea, an area with a high incidence of child abandonment, founder Cheryl Allen pioneered the “baby bin”.
It’s literally a hole in the wall, a place where mothers can anonymously leave their babies.
“The idea was for mothers to put their children here in a safe environment instead of throwing them in dustbins,” Nadene Grabham, operations director at Door of Hope, explains.
The concept elicited some strong criticism from advocates in the child protection space.
“There were people who tried to shut us down when we first started,” says Grabham, perched at a children’s picnic table in the garden of one of the organisation’s homes in southern Johannesburg. “Even now, some doctors will say to us that we are making it easy for women to abandon their babies.”
But of the almost 1600 children the organisation has cared for in the past 19 years, only 95 have come to them through the “baby box”. “It’s not a lot,” says Grabham. “So people cannot say that the baby box encourages abandonment, because that’s absolute nonsense. It’s 12% [of the total].”
Established 19 years ago, Door of Hope was slightly ahead of a trend that is now well established in every state in the United States. In Germany, “babyklappen” (baby hatches) have been legalised since 2000, and “foundling wheels” were instituted in Italy in 2006.
But there is little research to show their effect. There is no country in the world in which extensive empirical data about baby bins has been generated, a 2009 study in the journal Health Policy argues. “From the limited understanding we have of the motivational profile of an abandoning mother, it seems that fear of prosecution and a wish for anonymity were not at the forefront,” the authors note. So, it would seem that something other than a desire not to get “caught up by the law” is causing this phenomenon.
South Africa has very little research to guide it in how to deal with abandonment, says Blackie. “We seem to be stuck between shock and denial in this country. We refuse to actually acknowledge it’s a problem and we refuse to engage with it.
“I think the reason is: What does this actually say about our communities and our society as a whole if you find out the real numbers? It’s a huge indictment on us.”
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