Welfare workers are picking up an alarming increase in the number of abandoned babies, seeing in it the effects of growing economic distress — and particularly rocketing food prices.
Most are wrapped in black rubbish bags or left in the open veld.
Johannesburg Child Welfare Services (JCWS), an NGO, says at least 19 babies were abandoned in Johannesburg in May alone, compared with two or three a month in previous years.
Last year, 927 abandoned babies and lost children were reported to the JCWS.
Maureen Coetzee, head of foster care at the JCWS, says a baby, a two-year-old and a six-year-old were found abandoned together on a street corner.
In one incident a newborn infant was found in Jo’burg with the umbilical cord still attached. Dogs had started to savage the child, whose arm had to be amputated.
Child-welfare specialists say escalating living costs are a contributor.
“What strikes me is the shocking circumstances in which mothers are abandoning their babies. It just shows you how desperate women have become,” says JCWS adoptions manager Pam Wilson. “Many of these girls come from rural areas with the promise of a job in the city. They often fall prey to sugar daddies, who become their only means of survival. The girls then try to hide the pregnancy from the older men in fear of losing their place to stay.”
Wilson says many babies are abandoned because the mother is HIV-positive and scared of transmitting the virus to the child. Others avoid approaching authorities because they are illegal immigrants and fear being deported. “They abandon the baby in an act of desperation.”
Exacerbating the problem of abandonment is the decline of interest in adoptions. Wilson says the number of queries has dwindled from an average of 10 a month last year to three or four a month this year. In some months there are no queries at all.
Last year the organisation facilitated 99 adoptions and received 1 390 queries.
According to the Department of Social Development, adoptions fell from 2 612 between April 2005 and March 2006 to 2 377 in the corresponding period in 2006/7.
Khosi Msibisi, manager of the JCWS’s child and family unit, says that about two out of five abandoned babies die. “Eight babies have died since January because they were found in a sickly and frail condition.”
The national injury mortality surveillance system estimates that a 111 babies died between 2001 and 2005 after being abandoned in Jo’burg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. A total of 41 died in Johannesburg.
One response to mothers’ abandoning their babies is the Door of Hope, which offers a physical hole in a wall in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, in which babies can be placed without questions being asked. As soon as a baby is put in a “baby bin” a bell goes off and members of the organisation collect the child.
Since it was established nine years ago, Door of Hope has received 685 babies, 60% of whom were adopted. Door of Hope director Kate Allen says the organisation was saving about 12 babies a month “from ending up on the street”.