EVERY day, tucked between headlines blaring out recession woes, are smaller, more private stories of maternal despair played out tragically in public.
This month alone, two newborns have been found dead in Singapore: One chucked in the electrical riser of an HDB block, and the other in a dustbin at Changi Airport’s Terminal One.
Last October, a sleeping baby, with its umbilical cord still attached, was found at a rubbish dump in Teck Whye Lane.
Last Wednesday, a Samoan woman gave birth to a girl on a flight from Samoa to Auckland, then left her in the dustbin of the aircraft’s toilet. The mother has been charged by the police.
These cases seem to bear out an observation by welfare experts that the credit crunch is fuelling a boom in abandoned children.
The Austrian Times reported this month that clinics in Germany have recorded a fourfold increase in the number of infants dumped in the past year.
As unemployment rates rise, it already seems that the most helpless group of humans in the world are the worst hit.
I don’t pretend to know what goes through the mind of a mother desperate enough to abandon her newborn.
Perhaps it is the cold, hard, terror of becoming a mother; the onset of paralysis when confronted with the physical, mewling evidence of one’s mistakes, coupled with the dread of joblessness.
So, is the dour financial climate breeding irresponsible parents?
If so, what should be done?
If the recession has something to do with the plight of abandoned babies, then don’t these innocent young lives deserve a bailout, too?
In 2005, alarmed by the rising number of abandoned babies, Italy revived the mediaeval practice of foundling hospitals.
These had high-tech versions of the “foundling wheel”, a revolving crib that allowed hospital staff to collect the infant without seeing who left it.
Hungarian hospitals have special incubators in their lobbies which are designed for unwanted newborns, to prevent mothers from killing them.
And Texas has a “Baby Moses” law to protect infants whose parents cannot care for them.
The law gives parents the option of leaving a child under 60 days old at a safe place, such as a hospital or fire station.
Earlier this month, in the Philippines, a law was passed that fast-tracked the adoption of abandoned babies, reducing the time required for them to be declared available for adoption to less than two months, down from the previous three years.
The idea is to not delay or deny these children their chance of growing up in a caring family.
Of course, this begs the question of whether such measures would be abused if we were to introduce them here, leading to a wave of rash abandonment by parents who leave the state to pick up the tab.
The answer, I wager, lies in a two-pronged campaign to educate Singaporeans and fresh immigrants about the costs of – and alternatives to – committing such crimes.
In the meantime, we’d have to do what we can. While crumbling corporations and Ponzi schemes can exact a huge toll on nations, the wanton casting out of children does intangible damage to a community’s soul.
It’s not just the cleaners, policemen and kind passers-by who are traumatised by the death of an abandoned newborn, but also our collective conscience.
These cases are a sign of how people can walk away from the mess they made when things get too much to bear; a deliberate break in a family’s genealogy mirroring the fractured times we are now muddling through.
Now, more than any other, is the time to hold onto our offspring, and the joy and hope they represent for the future.
If abandoned newborns – and the circumstances that lead to their abandonment – are swept under the carpet, then the reality is that we, as a society, have much growing up to do.
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