You read about it all the time. The baby left to die in a restroom or shoved in a garbage can. The story breaks your heart. A little better but not much is the baby left abandoned on the steps of an orphanage or a hospital. Will someone find it before it dies from exposure?
In a world where so many wonderful would be parents are denied that joy it seems particularly heartless. So it should come as no surprise that modern technology has come up with a simple, safe and even somewhat elegant solution to the problem of women abandoning babies.
In the middle ages new Mommies that didn’t want to be could give up their unwanted babies in what is called a foundling wheel. It was a revolving barrel sort of device attached to a wall usually in a convent that allowed for anonymous drop offs. Now at a hospital in Rome of all places a new sort of foundling wheel that resembles an A.T.M. booth has been designed and already been used. A baby boy who was 3 months old was dropped off anonymously into the unit which has a heated cradle and sounds an alarm at a nearby hospital when an infant is shoved inside.
The unit cost about $52 thousand bucks to produce and has been highly advertised on posters throughout the city. The posters say in several languages, including English “don’t abandon your baby, leave it with us.†It would seem to be a simple solution to a heartrending problem that has plagued mankind for whatever reason since just after Adam and Eve.
And I will go out on a limb here by saying that it will never be allowed in this country. Why? Because the powers that be will prevent it with moral judgments and legal roadblocks and everything in their power. It would be like telling young mothers that it’s ok to abandon their kids in safe and anonymous way the men who make our laws would say. No: here in America we prefer you give birth in a filthy restroom and leave the poor thing in a waste basket. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem in the world, these abandoned babies. But finding a solution is better than leaving the babies to die, cold and unprotected in squalor, isn’t it?
