When the alarm sounds at Jikei Hospital in southwestern Japan, nurses race up a spiral staircase to collect abandoned newborns as quickly as possible from the medical center’s ‘baby box’, the only one in the world. country.
This Catholic hospital in Kumamoto, on the island of Kyushu, created this system in 2007 that allows a baby to be abandoned anonymously and also offers other services such as a birth program without identification, also unique in Japan.
A place like ours, which rejects no one, (…), is very important for these anguished young mothers
These initiatives have earned the medical center criticism, but its chief medical officer, Takeshi Hasuda, sees them as a vital safety net. “There are women who are ashamed and very afraid” because of the feeling of “having done something horrible” when they become pregnant, she explains to AFP. “A place like ours, which rejects no one, (…), is very important” for these anguished young mothers.
When they hear the alarm, the nurses try to reach the ‘baby box’ in less than a minute, decorated with a pair of storks and equipped with a small bed carefully prepared. “If the mothers are still around, we suggest they share their story with us,” says Saori Taminaga, a hospital employee.
The team tries to guarantee the health of the mothers, listening to them and giving them advice, and encourages them to leave information that will allow the child to know its origins later.
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no one to turn to
Abandoned baby boxes have been around the world for centuries and endure today, for example in Belgium, Germany, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Malaysia, Switzerland, South Korea, and the United States. His return in some European countries in the early 2000s was criticized by the UN, which considered that it went “against the right of the child to be known and cared for by his or her parents.”
Abandoned baby boxes have been around the world for centuries and persist today, for example in Germany, Belgium, South Korea and the United States.
According to a London BBC publicationKumamoto has a special committee, made up of specialists in child welfare, doctors and lawyers, which evaluates the operation of the ‘baby box’. This committee strongly advocates contact with parents who give up their children, denouncing that the mailbox facilitates abandonment and warning that it is inadmissible to remain anonymous.
Journalist Morimoto Nobuyo, member of the Culture and Life editorial board of the Japanese newspaper ‘Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun‘has been a criticism of the mailbox.
In an article published the same year that the system was created at Jikei Hospital, the communicator assured that in a country like Japan, which has signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which makes explicit the right of minors to know origins themselves, children abandoned in the ‘baby mailbox’ could spend their entire lives searching for their roots, like those who were separated from their parents in war.
“They don’t know exactly when they were born. No health insurance admits them because they do not have the medical history of their parents. They are forced to bear the responsibility for the unwanted pregnancy of parents whose identity and circumstances they do not know. And should those children take on these disadvantages just because “their lives were saved?” she wrote.
Jikei Hospital estimates, however, that his ‘baby mailbox’ is a means of preventing child abuse in Japan, where the police recorded 27 child abandonments in 2020, and where 57 children died of abuse in 2019. According to Hasuda, some children taken in are “the fruit of prostitution, rape or incest”, and their mothers have no one who to address
In all, 161 babies and toddlers have been dropped off at Jikei since 2007, sometimes by people arriving from across the country.
But the system continues to have trouble gaining acceptance in Japan, particularly because of a traditional understanding of the family, according to Chiaki Shirai, a professor at Shizuoka University who specializes in issues of reproduction and adoption.
The country uses a family registration system that includes births, deaths and marriages of a family through generations. This pillar of the administrative apparatus also shapes opinions about family structure.
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This “has anchored in Japanese society the idea that someone who gave birth to a child must raise it”, to the point that children are considered almost “the property” of the parents, explains Shirai. “Children who are abandoned and whose registration indicates that they have no family are strongly stigmatized,” she adds.
designated women
Despite the anonymity offered by the system, child protection services generally try to find the family of abandoned children in Jikei. In this way, about 80% of them have discovered the identity of their family, and 20% found their parents or relatives.
The hospital also proposes a maternity telephone assistance service that receives several thousand calls a year, and a childbirth program without identification
The hospital also proposes a maternity telephone assistance service that receives several thousand calls a year, and an unidentified childbirth program aimed at avoiding unassisted home births. Although it has hardly been used so far (only two births took place in this way), this system is not unanimously approved either and the Government, without declaring it illegal, has not wanted to regularize it.
Chiaki Shirai stresses that women who use the ‘baby box’ or give birth without identification are often criticized for not having chosen other alternatives such as abortion, which is legal in Japan but very expensive. Society prefers to blame women, and their “motivation” to empathize with them or help them “is low, or totally nonexistent,” laments Hasuda.
‘What I am, I owe to the mailbox’
Koichi Miyatsu takes from a backpack boy’s clothes with manga characters and a pair of sneakers, the only items from his life before he was abandoned in the ‘baby mailbox’. “I was wearing some of those clothes when they left me there,” this 18-year-old tells AFP today. “They are the oldest memories of my childhood, I have preserved them with great care.”
Koichi this year became the first person to give public testimony after being abandoned in the ‘baby box’ at Jikei Hospital. His remarks reignited the debate on this system, presented by its defenders as a last resort for marginalized women and parents who do not want or cannot resort to adoption, but which for its critics encourages the abandonment of children.
However, for Koichi, the question is out of the question. The day he was abandoned “was the beginning of a new chapter in my life,” explains this sociology and politics student. “What I am I owe to the baby mailbox,” he adds. According to the hospital, the system makes it possible to prevent ill-treatment and even the death of children.
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etched in memory
Shortly after being abandoned, Koichi was taken in by Yoshimitsu and Midori Miyatsu, in the rural Kumamoto apartment. Biological parents of five children, their house has received more than thirty children. “I told myself that an angel had been sent to us,” recalls Yoshimitsu, 65, of Koichi’s arrival.
The couple are long-time supporters of Jikei’s program after witnessing the hardships experienced by other children placed with foster families: broken homes, delinquency, unwanted pregnancies, some even ending up on the streets.
“One frosty day in December, a young woman who was heavily pregnant and with almost no money came to us asking for help… We knew there were children who needed” this ‘baby mailbox’, says Midori, 63.
Koichi, one of the first abandoned children in Jikei, did not have any objects with him that would indicate his name, age or place of birth. “I don’t have any recollection of the moment I was dropped off…but the image of the mailbox door is etched in a corner of my memory,” he says.
I have no recollection of the moment they left me… but the image of the mailbox door was etched in a corner of my memory
Almost a year later, he was shown a photo of that door in a newspaper. “He told us, ‘I was there.’ It was at that moment that we knew she remembered,” explains Midori.
The mayor of the city gave him a name, and his age was established by DNA tests. The early days were difficult, as as a child he had nightmares and constantly sucked on his thumb.
But the couple never hid their past from her, and over time, the trauma subsided. Years later, Koichi learned more about his origins and discovered, for example, that his birth mother died in a car accident five months after his birth. He has kept a photo of her and says he has the impression that he “takes care of her from heaven.”
“I would like to tell her that I have grown up, that I am 18 years old and that I want to live the life that was cut short too soon for her.”, he assures. Once a month, Koichi distributes food to underprivileged children at a local church, saying that he wants to work with children in the future, and perhaps become a foster parent as well.
He hopes that his public testimony will prompt other abandoned children to tell their own story, and recalls that he overcame “complicated feelings”. “Even though some pieces are missing, this doesn’t fundamentally change who I am today. I don’t think my identity has to be dictated by the first few years of my life,” she thinks. “Life – she says – after the baby mailbox is much more important”.
TOMOHIRO OSAKI (AFP)
KUMAMOTO (JAPAN)
On Twitter: @AFPespanol
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