"Baby Boxes" Save Lives

This is from the British Medical Journal online.

Italy introduces “baby boxes” to save lives of abandoned newborns

Rome Clare Chapman


Special boxes that allow mothers to abandon their newborn babies with no questions asked have now spread from Germany and Hungary to Italy.

Germany and Hungary introduced such boxes in separate but similar initiatives about five years ago to help prevent dozens of deaths of newborn babies abandoned on the streets.

The boxes are the high tech, modern equivalent of the old medieval foundling wheels operated by orphanages in Padua from the 1400s until 1888. The wheels were a circular wooden board half inside and half outside the orphanages run by nuns. Mothers placed their unwanted newborns on the board and rang a bell, and the nuns would spin the board to find the child.

The modern incubators, dubbed the baby post boxes by the European media, are installed in hospitals and can be opened from the inside or outside, much like bank deposit boxes.

Christians have been taking in unwanted babies now for 2000 years. It is good to see that the hospitals are willing to do this sort of thing in Italy, Germany, and Hungary.