Surely you all remember some scene of a movie in which a mother or father abandons their newborn baby on the steps of a convent. At present, this abandonment model is a bit outdated and, unfortunately, babies have been found in containers or directly dead.
To avoid this, some countries have been devising new formulas that protect babies for years and one that especially catches my attention is to create a "mailbox" where to leave the baby you don't want, to be picked up by medical professionals who offer you first assistance. These mailboxes exist for more than 10 years in Austria (in other countries there are other similar solutions), they are called babyklappe and they are as dear as hated.
What are mailboxes for abandoning babies
A "babyklappe" or mailbox for abandoning babies is a small room in a hospital that has a window that faces the street and opens from the outside. This window overlooks a heated crib monitored by a video camera.
The moment someone opens that window an alarm is triggered in the intensive care unit Notifying medical staff that a baby is being deposited.
The person making the delivery, which is not recorded in the video, finds a letter written in eight languages that explains how to contact the hospital and an ink stamp to take a print of the newborn. So that person has the possibility, if he later recants or thinks better, of come back to claim the baby. At that time the window closes being impossible to reopen it from outside.
The baby safe and anonymous delivery
The baby safe is considered the last step of a series of strategies that have as their first goal to protect the most fragile beings, babies. Let's say that, in a matter of prevention, the first thing is the sex education, to try to prevent unwanted pregnancies, then the anonymous birth, an option that is offered to those women who want to give birth without giving their name (because they do not want anyone to know that they have been mothers) and in solution to the possibility that they can give birth alone anywhere and leave at that moment to the babies, and finally the baby mailbox or babyklappe.
The mailboxes have been operating in Austria for ten years and, to make this possible, the legislation had to be changed, which penalized the abandonment of children, to allow it on the condition that it was in a babyklappe, without the need to give personal data.
As dear as criticized
Andreas Lischka, head of Pediatrics at Wihelminenspital, which is the only hospital in Vienna that has a lifeguard mailbox, gives his opinion on them by saying the following:
Even if it had only been a child, it is already worth it. I do not understand the reactions against this project, which costs so little and contributes so much ... The idea is that this mother, after childbirth, in total despair for whatever reason, can take advantage of a legal possibility not to leave the child in a dumpster at five degrees below zero.
Till the date 29 children have been left in the mailboxes since 2001. At that time the numbers of dead or abandoned newborn babies were increasing and one of the solutions offered was this.
Explained thus seems a good idea (it seems to me), however there are those who criticize these mailboxes for the inability of children to be able to trace their true origins. The anonymity is such that the child who is picked up by the doctors can only be identified if the person who leaves him appears in the hospital with the document that remains when leaving the baby.
True, children, if their parents do not appear to claim it, will never know what its origins are. However, personally, I would prefer a thousand times to never know who my father and mother were or why they abandoned me, that they could not even ask me why they decided to leave me anywhere where nobody found me.
