Those crazy Germans…
clamrampant March 16th, 2007
Deedah sent me this story. It’s about a drunken German man who managed to climb into an emergency baby deposit box at a hospital in Dortmund, Germany.
But that’s not so much what shocked me. I mean, it sounds like he was incredibly drunk (he fell asleep in the incubator as the staff tried to get him out), so stranger things have probably happened. No, what shocked me was that German and Austrian hospitals have set up these baby depositaries to begin with.
I’m a little conflicted about the whole thing. On the one hand, it sounds a bit like what Mother Teresa’s orphanages do in India: if you don’t want your baby, give him or her to us. We’ll take care of it. And if it keeps babies from being aborted, that’s a good thing, right?
On the other hand, this seems to remove any last vestige of responsibility from the parents, and further divorces actions from consequences. I don’t want my baby? I’ll just drop it in an emergency chute – the state will take care of things. You don’t have to see a social worker. You don’t even have to sign a form. What does that mean down the road for these babies as they grow up and need to know their medical histories?
It means that these babies will have a chance at life-not one full of all of the abuse and torture that we read about in the papers every day. It means that their teenage mother will be able to think back on her baby with the peace in knowing the she did the right thing-rather than thinking back at all of the abuse that she forced on this baby out of youth and immaturity with regret and a 25 year life sentence behind bars. It means that families who cannot have children but desperately want to give their love to a child can do so. It means that God’s will is being done-not satan’s through abortion and child abuse.
Fair points, Cris. I guess I’m still tinged by the idealism of my younger days, and inclined to see the cloud rather than the silver lining.
This still doesn’t seem like an ideal solution to me (the ideal adoption scenario, IMHO, would involve a paper trail so as it becomes relevant the adoptee could find out things like medical history), but I absolutely agree it’s worlds better than abortion or abuse.