Record year for babies left in Belgian hatch

LAST year was a record year for children being anonymously “abandoned” in a baby box hatch in Antwerp.

“Since 2000, we have had 13 babies left in the box,” Katrin Beyer, 62, the cofounder of Moeders Voor Moeders [Mothers For Mothers] food and clothes parcel charity, told The Daily Telegraph, “but [in 2017] we have had four. It is a record and we don’t know why.”

Baby hatches were installed in city or convent towers in medieval Belgium and across Europe to ensure children could be left anonymously and safely to others’ care. Antwerp’s modern box has a heated crib behind a clouded door, much like an ATM foyer, that locks as soon as the “hole in the wall” is opened by pressing a digital code.

Kathleen Van Brempt, an Antwerp city councillor and MEP, said the rise in abandoned babies could be due to a growth in poverty. Ms Beyer blamed a culture of secrecy and the fact it is legally impossible to give birth anonymously in a Belgian hospital, forcing some women to have home births.