NEWS-FINANCE -QUOTE-EDUCATIONAL AND MOTIVATIONAL
When Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist – something like that,” she told me, more than three years on.
By the time she noticed the changes in her body, she had been homeless for nearly seven years. Before that, she had lived a comfortable, secure life in The Hague, with a man she had fallen pblockionately in love with. But the man had become controlling, she said, preventing her from working or seeing her friends, spying on her and eventually threatening her if she left him.
She left him anyway, one night around Christmas 2014, and so opened a very dark chapter in a life that, to hear Romina, had already known its fair share of darkness – her parents’ divorce when she was three; years of ***ual abuse at the hands of a stepfather; her mother’s many suicide attempts, the last of which, in 2009, succeeded; estrangement from her two half-siblings; and separation from her two sons (one of whom was just a toddler) after she entered into that last, abusive relationship, leaving them with their fathers.
Her ex had political clout locally, so Romina felt that the only way to prevent him from tracking her down was to disappear into the city’s shadow world. The first night on the streets was the worst, she said. It was raining and cold. She didn’t have enough money for a hotel, and the little she had, she knew she had to keep for food, so she walked, and cried. When she finally slept, after three wakeful days and nights, it was in a parking garage.
For a woman alone, it can be a toss-up as to which is riskier, staying inside a homeless shelter or on the street, and except in winter, Romina preferred to take her chances outside. “It’s strange,” she said, “but only six months were very hard, because you still have hope and you know a better life. After six months you don’t know it any more, your brain goes into survival mode.” In her mind, all her ties of family and friendship fell away. Her sole preoccupations were finding food and a safe place to sleep.
Romina and I spoke via a video call, because she was still nervous about revealing her whereabouts. Her laugh is full-throated and her English excellent, given that she told me she learned it from Netflix. She has a mblock of blond curls and was wearing red lipstick and had a tattoo the length of her forearm. She looked younger than her 42 years.
She had two lifelines during those years, she said: an old school friend who let her wash and use the internet at his place when his girlfriend was at work, and Tinder, the dating app. She would have *** with men in exchange for a bed for the night. She was aware that sounded like *** work, but said she only chose men she found attractive. With one of those men the relationship was “Netflix and chill”. They always used a condom, but she got pregnant anyway.
By the time it became impossible for her to deny her condition, the relationship was petering out, so she decided not to tell the man. She tapped a query into Google – “pregnant, homeless, what now?” – and up came a name she’d never seen before, Beschermde Wieg, which is Dutch for “protected cradle”. It was the name of a foundation that ran a number of “baby rooms” across the Netherlands, places where you could give up your baby anonymously, relinquishing – without judgment – any role in that baby’s life along with any straightforward way for him or her to find you.
In the moment, the anonymous option appealed to Romina. She fired off an inquiry, since the foundation also offered anonymous advice. That was how she entered into contact with the women who, by providing information and unflagging support, would help her turn her life around.
She broke off from our conversation to reblockure her son, now three, who was clamouring for her attention in the background. Like the vast majority of expectant parents who have enquired about baby rooms in the 11 years that they have operated in the Netherlands, Romina ended up keeping her child.
The founders and staff of Beschermde Wieg insist that their rooms offer a caring alternative to the more controversial baby windows – also known as baby hatches, life windows or safe haven boxes – where a person simply deposits a baby in a secure vault, often in the wall of a public building, and walks away. To the dismay of many, this modern incarnation of the medieval foundling wheel has made a comeback since the turn of the millennium, proliferating in countries rich and poor.
Beschermde Wieg believes there are enough new parents in crisis – including victims of rape or incest, fugitives and the extremely young – that it’s vital the option exists of giving up your baby anonymously.
As Romina attempted to express her gratitude to the foundation, her English temporarily deserted her. Then she found the words. At the moment when her pregnancy forced her to act, she said, she trusted no one and had nothing to give. Without Beschermde Wieg, either she would have abandoned her child somewhere less safe, or she would be dead. “They saved us,” she said, simply.
Infant abandonment and infanticide – which are often mentioned in the same breath – are not subjects that most people like to think about. Even Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, who studied them for years in the context of her wider interest in child-rearing, finds them hard topics to discuss now that she is a mother and a grandmother.
Though typically rare, abandonment is do***ented as far back as records go. There’s plenty of evidence it predates history, too, and even the emergence of home sapiens. Hrdy has argued that men and women are strategists hardwired to enhance their reproductive success. A pregnancy carried to term is a huge investment of resources, and usually the rational choice is to nurture and protect that investment. Very occasionally, however, cir***stances arise that make the rational choice to write it off – as painful as that might be. Those cir***stances include economic policies that separate new mothers from their support networks, and social conventions such as an extreme preference for sons. In her 1999 book, Mother Nature, Hrdy quotes a chilling note penned by a Roman soldier to his wife in the first century BC: “If you are delivered of child … if it is a boy keep it, if a girl discard it.”
No country collects data systematically on abandonment, making it difficult to see what is driving it at a granular level. Newborn babies abandoned or killed before their existence is officially registered may, tragically, pblock under the radar. We do know that abandonment reflects changes in the socioeconomic context. Today, abortion bans and crackdowns on illegal immigration are among the factors pushing it up. In the past it was principally lack of access to maternal care, stigmatising of single mothers, and poverty. Lorraine Sherr, a psychologist at University College London who studies abandonment, calls it a “lightning rod” for society’s ills, because it’s in childbirth – when humans are at their most vulnerable – that the strains show first and most dramatically.
So many dead babies – more girls than boys – were being fished out of the Tiber by 1198 that a Roman church had a rotating cylinder fitted into its wall. A person could place a baby in the cylinder on the street side and rotate it into the building – abandoning the child anonymously. By 1400, foundling wheels were to be seen all over Europe. You can still see one at the Innocenti, a hospital turned museum in Florence, where the wheel is covered by a grille that was supposed to prevent people from shoving in older children. Indeed, Innocenti, along with Esposito (“exposed” in English, as in “left out”), were once surnames commonly given to foundlings.
By the late 18th century, abandonment rates in many European capitals had peaked, shockingly, at about one in four births, and Hrdy has written of “epidemics of foundlings”. Misuse was suspected – birth parents presenting themselves as foster parents to collect monetary compensation, for example – and the windows began to be phased out, to be replaced in some countries by consignment offices where you were required to identify yourself. Maternity care and social services slowly improved. Methods of contraception other than abstinence became available from the 19th century, and legal abortion from the 20th – though, of course, not everywhere. Then in the late 1990s – for reasons including the decriminalisation of abandonment, and academic and media interest in the topic – the baby window was back on the scene.
The typical baby window is a vault in the wall of a building – sometimes a hospital or clinic, sometimes a fire station or religious-run institution. Inside is a cradle and occasionally also writing materials in case the person depositing the baby wants to leave a note. They slide up a window, place the baby in the temperature-controlled interior and close the window again. They then have a few minutes to leave or change their mind, before the window locks and an alarm sounds inside the building.
Today, baby windows can be found throughout the world, though they are concentrated in regions where access to contraception and abortion is restricted. The US and Germany are outliers, with about 300 and 100 respectively. Most countries have many fewer, and the UK and France have none (the UK doesn’t allow women to give birth anonymously, France does). In 2024, a woman named Toyin Odumala, who was herself abandoned as a child, launched a petition calling for baby windows to be introduced in the UK, in light of the highly publicised case of three siblings abandoned a few years apart in the same area of east London.
Sister Ancilla runs the home for mothers and babies on a quiet residential street in Krakow, Poland. Financed by a Catholic charity, the Family Accompaniment Foundation, the home currently has four women and their babies in residence. But it serves a second function, having a baby window – a “window of life” as it is called in the country – fitted into the wall on the street side.
The Krakow window was the first to be inaugurated in Poland, in March 2006, at the request of Pope John Paul II. Three months later it received its first baby, a girl; since then it has received 24 others – 12 of each ***, including two sets of twins. The abandoned babies spend no more than a few hours in the home – the nuns’ role is to care for them until an ambulance arrives, and inform the family court so that the adoption process can get under way – nevertheless some of these modern foundlings have marked the sisters deeply.
One premature girl was left in a shoebox, Sister Ancilla told me, wrapped in an old T-shirt, with the placenta and umbilical cord still attached – and, it transpired, drugs in her system. This was before Ancilla’s time but, she said: “There was a presumption that it probably wasn’t the mother who brought the baby. She wouldn’t have been capable.” The nuns also suspected that the woman might have been a *** worker. The little girl survived, and Ancilla believes she went on to be adopted.
Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, and the Krakow window – like the dozens of others across the country – is advertised through churches and welfare blockociations. Over the years, police spokespeople have been quoted by local media as saying that the number of infanticides has dropped in the Krakow region since it was installed – the implication being that it is saving lives. A similar claim is made by Swiss Aid for Mother and Child, the non-profit organisation that runs six of eight baby windows in Switzerland, and by Safe Haven Baby Boxes, the company that has furnished all of the US baby windows.
But the data doesn’t really support these claims. Given that poverty is a known cause of abandonment, it could be rising incomes that have driven down infanticide in Poland – or lessening of the stigma attached to unmarried mothers. Sherr distinguishes between babies abandoned to live and those abandoned to die. Most experts agree that baby windows have no effect on infanticide rates, because forensic psychiatric evidence indicates that women who kill their babies – many of whom conceal or deny their pregnancies, then panic when they give birth – experience a degree of emotional turmoil that precludes the planning and problem-solving that using a window entails. They could reduce the number of babies abandoned to live, some of whom will die accidentally, but the data is ambiguous on this point at best. About 700 babies are given up in Polish hospitals each year, on average, compared with fewer than 10 via the baby windows. The hospital route is safer for mother and child, but not anonymous. Nobody can say what would happen to those 10 babies if the windows didn’t exist, and women were better informed about their rights and options. They might be abandoned in unsafe places, or their parents might choose the standard adoption route.
There is even some evidence that baby windows encourage the very thing they’re designed to combat. When the Danish government was deliberating over whether to introduce them, it commissioned Laura Navne and Marie Jakobsen of the Danish National Centre for Social Research, in Copenhagen, to carry out a survey of the impact of baby windows in 10 high-income countries. The pair’s startling conclusion, published in 2021, was that “they increase the incidence of child abandonment”. The government decided against installing them.
The Danish finding echoes recent historical research conducted in Italy, showing that abandonment rates fell after the foundling wheels were phased out in the 19th century. The wheels provided both a solution for poor families with more children than they could support, the researchers found, and a secret, socially acceptable way of getting rid of babies born out of wedlock. In so doing, they entrenched the stigma attached to unmarried mothers, while fathers were unaccountable. Today’s baby windows operate in a different cultural context, but they too have that dual function, the study’s authors argued – protecting infants and perpetuating a system that fails to tackle the root causes of abandonment.
About 20 years ago, in an unpublished but much-cited anecdotal report, Hungarian child rights advocate Mária Herczog and colleagues interviewed porters at a Budapest hospital where visitors to the baby window were captured on CCTV. The hospital had the particularity of being located in the city’s red light district, and the porters related that most of the 16 babies left there over the decade or so covered by the footage were brought by men. Who those men were, nobody knows.
It’s impossible to generalise from such a small and unscientific study, but it does serve as a reminder not to blockume that the mother is the one giving up her baby, or even that she has consented to do so. For Herczog, the windows cynically exploit the most vulnerable women in society, since it is often the same women providing ***ual services and babies for adoption. She called the devices “profoundly anti-mother” and said that many women end up giving birth in unsafe conditions before returning to bad situations where they quickly get pregnant again: “It is not a solution.” In her view, a humane society would intervene earlier, helping women to avoid unwanted pregnancies and supporting them through wanted ones. Sherr agrees. “I always say the mother of the abandoned baby is herself abandoned,” she said.
To be fair, Poland’s Family Accompaniment Foundation and Swiss Aid for Mother and Child try to intervene early, offering counselling and support. But both are – or are perceived to be – anti-abortion. The founder of the Swiss organisation, Dominik Müggler, did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article, but among the 33 reasons to have a baby, posted on the organisation’s website, visitors can read: “Because God wants babies to live.” Herczog finds it telling that where the emphasis is on supporting mothers and keeping families together, as in the Netherlands and parts of Switzerland, the windows (or rooms) stand mostly unused.
In 2016, the Swiss canton of Valais installed a baby box that is funded, not by Müggler’s organisation, but by the cantonal authorities, who wanted it to be ideologically and religiously neutral. Their aim was to reduce the infanticide rate, said the paediatrician who oversees the box, Juan Llor of the cantonal hospital at Sion, who was personally sceptical that it would have that effect. Since 2016, seven babies have been given up for adoption in the canton’s hospitals, but not one has been placed in the box. “If the baby box is used, that’s a failure of care for the pregnant woman and the family,” Llor said, adding that his initial scepticism had been vindicated: the window had had no impact on the Valais infanticide rate.
The residents of the Krakow mother-and-baby home are in no doubt that an anonymous solution is needed. Several of them wrote me letters telling me how, though they couldn’t have imagined giving up their own babies, they could easily understand women in situations only slightly more perilous than theirs choosing that path.
Beschermde Wieg, the Dutch organisation that Romina credits with saving her life, thinks it has found a happy medium – a way to offer anonymity humanely. It was founded by Barbara Müller, who previously worked in child protection, where she saw too many children let down by a dysfunctional care system, and concluded that more needed to be done early on, to keep families together. So in 2013, in her home town of Dordrecht, she set up a home where pregnant women or new mothers could find temporary accommodation and support.
A year later Müller decided that she still wasn’t reaching the most vulnerable women – those whose desperate cir***stances forced them to hide their pregnancies and to abandon or kill their newborns. She shared her frustration with her friend Kitty Nusteling, a mother of five who was working in the private sector then, organising childcare for middle-clblock families. Nusteling realised that she, too, would rather help women in greater need.
At the time, around five abandoned babies were being found each year in the Netherlands, most of them lifeless. “And you can ask yourself the question, how many babies are not found?” said Nusteling. She and Müller felt that many new mothers in crisis might just need some respite, and that if they got it they would eventually – and joyfully – take their babies back. They decided to provide that respite, in anonymity and with no ideological or religious slant. “We’re pro-choice, we’re not pro-life,” said Nusteling.
Uncomfortable with the somewhat brutal image of a hatch through which you pblock your baby, never to see him or her again, they conceived of a room complete with child-friendly murals, cuddly toys and a sheepskin-lined rocking chair. A person couldn’t give birth in the room, but they could spend undisturbed time there, settling the baby in and saying goodbye to him or her – also, importantly, browsing literature about the other options available – before pressing the button that would signal the baby’s presence, and leaving. Since Müller’s plan contravened Dutch law, which protects a child’s right to know its origins – a right enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – she decided to keep the baby room separate from the mother-and-baby home so as not to expose the latter to legal risk. So Beschermde Wieg, of which Nusteling is director of operations, was born in the converted garage of a volunteer’s house in Dordrecht.
The law could apply to anyone seen as enabling or provoking anonymous abandonment, as well as to the person actually abandoning, and the punishment could include a hefty fine and jail time. Müller said that the first time a woman brought her baby to the room, she was invited to the justice ministry, interrogated and threatened with prison, but the threat didn’t materialise. Eventually she was summoned to an official hearing at the ministry where she just kept repeating her line: “You are reading the UN convention in the wrong way.” In focusing on article 7, about a child’s right to know their birth parents, she explained that officials had overlooked article 6, which defends a child’s right to life. Müller argued that a person could only wonder about who gave birth to them if they were alive.
In 2019, the government changed its stance. Though anonymous abandonment remained illegal, operating and using the rooms would no longer be punishable. The foundation even received funding from the Dutch health ministry after that, though nowadays it relies on private donations to pay for the 14 baby rooms – 13 fixed and one mobile – that it runs across the country, including nine in hospitals.
If someone wants to give up a baby in the Netherlands, the official procedure begins with the child being placed with a foster family for three months. At the end of that period, the birth parents have an opportunity to change their mind. If they don’t, the baby goes to an adoptive family, but the birth parents have a say in the choice of that family. Their identity is kept on record, and the child can obtain it, if he or she wants to, upon turning adult.
Beschermde Wieg respects this protocol scrupulously, but it inserts the extra option of anonymity. Many parents in crisis are drawn to the baby room, Nusteling said, but few ultimately choose it. Of the roughly 1,700 who contact the foundation each year, 17 give up their babies, around two-thirds of whom later reclaim them. The foundation’s goal is to reach the mother as early as possible in the pregnancy, and to help her change her situation – to get an education, say, or to escape a violent partner. It wants the rooms to stand empty.
Beschermde Wieg was vilified to begin with, but as it shared more of the nameless women’s stories, the criticism became more muted. “People saw over 10 years that there were not long queues of women wanting to give up their babies,” said Nusteling. “It’s not easy.” They also saw that the women weren’t all illegal immigrants – a common misconception. There were some of those, but there were also Polish women providing Dutch companies with cheap labour; young, unmarried Dutch women belonging to a strict Protestant denomination; and middle-aged ones like Romina, fleeing Dutch men with political influence. Perhaps, adds Müller, they also saw that there could be courage – and sense – in sacrificing your own desires to give your child a better life.
During Romina’s first exchange with Beschermde Wieg, she agreed to a prenatal scan four days later. It was January 2022. “The next day it was very cold outside,” she said. “It was raining and all my clothes were wet.” She fell sick and called the foundation, which arranged for an ambulance to pick her up. At the hospital she learned that she was three months pregnant. Technically she could still have requested an abortion, but having seen what she saw on the ultrasound screen, she decided that was no longer an option.
Feeling trapped and frightened, her mind zeroed in on the baby room. Nusteling and her colleagues dissuaded her from taking an irreversible decision too soon, and she agreed to a period of foster care. She gave birth on a Friday, in hospital, by caesarean section. Given that she would only keep her baby for a few days, the medical staff advised her not to breastfeed him. “I did it sneakily!” she said. The following Monday, the foster parents came. Handing him over to them was the hardest thing she has ever done, she said, but she felt she had no choice. She was still homeless. If she didn’t give him up, child protection would surely take him away from her.
She spent the next three months in a psychiatric facility, half the time sedated to help her cope with the emotional maelstrom that losing her baby pitched her into. “The first three weeks were awful because your body is screaming for a baby but there isn’t a baby,” she said. After six weeks she saw her son again, as the law required, and decided that she would do whatever it took to get him back. A judge agreed that she could have him, on condition that she found them a place to live. Beschermde Wieg’s sister organisation offered her a room in one of its mother-and-baby homes, and when her son was three months old they moved into it, taking a single bag of clothes.
Romina has some outstanding debts to The Hague city authorities. She is on welfare and feels guilty that there is no father figure in her son’s life. But she is slowly getting back on her feet, and has re-established contact with her older sons. Last Mother’s Day, they came to visit. She shows me a picture of her middle son playing with his younger half-brother, her arms encircling them both. All three are smiling.
When her youngest starts school, in a year’s time, she plans to find work. She and Nusteling have discussed the possibility of her joining Beschermde Wieg, to advise women going through experiences similar to hers. She knows it won’t be easy – for a start, she’s the perimenopausal single parent of an energetic three-year-old – but she can’t get over how lucky she’s been, or how surrounded she feels by kind people. “I have a beautiful home, I have food on the table, I have a shower, I have clothes,” she said. “Every day feels like a dream.”
