Europe’s Baby Boxes & China’s Coerced Abortions
Europe’s Baby Boxes & China’s Coerced Abortions
The news from two neighboring states one day this month offered a confounding paradox.
In Beijing, a government think tank published a major report urging China to revise its highly divisive one-child policy so that, by 2015, families could have a second child. As it is, the Chinese authorities order involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations, and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.
Next door in Russia the same day, health officials installed the nation’s tenth “baby box.”
The purpose of the boxes: Parents who don’t want their new babies can place them in the baby box, push a button, and then run away. A nurse or other caregiver will come fetch the child and presumably put it up for adoption.
Before baby boxes came along this year, Russian authorities cataloged 268 cases of parents abandoning their newborn children—dropping them in trash dumpsters, tossing them in snowdrifts, leaving them in the forest.
Baby boxes are proliferating across Europe so fast that the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is in a near-panic, arguing that dropping children in boxes “contravenes the right of the child to be known and cared for by his or her parents.”