Lost and found
Around 50 babies are abandoned every year in the UK – left in hospitals, doorways, bins, bushes and shopping bags. It’s criminal. Not just because a human will grow up rootless, believing mum didn’t want them, but because abandoning an infant is against the law – usually resulting in a custodial sentence.
50 mothers feeling they had no alternative is criminal. Other countries have ways of giving birth anonymously or leaving the child somewhere safe. We don’t. But what’s worse is the persistence of the shame, ignorance and vulnerability that puts women and their babies in this position in this country.
Written after reading Kate Adie’s book Nobody’s Child.
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