Baby havens close, renew concerns

Skills, staffing, funding among problems

Several baby hatches, or safe havens, in China continue to either cease operations or are forced to close down after the country's first baby hatch stopped receiving additional abandoned babies 10 months ago, triggering renewed public concerns over abandoned children.

A Xinhua News Agency report revealed Tuesday that many baby hatches have either closed or expressed their unwillingness to receive more babies. The sign of a baby hatch in Ji'nan, Shandong Province has been removed with an employee saying that "they do not want the hatch to become a public focus."

The baby hatch in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province was the first one to halt its operations, after reportedly received 262 babies in 50 days in March 2014.

Baby hatches in Xiamen, Fujian Province has been also closed recently, the news portal js.chinanews.com reported.

The baby hatch in Ji'nan received 106 abandoned babies in 11 days since its opening on June 1, 2014, the Qilu Evening News reported.

Others have been struggling to stay open.

Employees at the baby hatch in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province have been persuading parents not to abandon their children, after the number of babies it received in 2014 tripled that of 2013.

Nearly all of abandoned babies received by the baby hatch in Nanjing suffered from serious congenital diseases. Their parents transferred the medical burden and pressure to welfare centers, said Zhu Hong, the president of the welfare center in Nanjing, which oversees the baby hatch.

Media reports showed that there are only 40 beds in the quarantine room at the baby hatch in Nanjing, where some beds are shared by two sick babies. Those recovering sometimes had to make room for badly ill.

"The numbers of abandoned babies will not change because of the existence or closure of baby hatches. But the closure of the hatches means that more babies will die," Chen Lan, the founder of the Home of Little Hope, a Shanghai-based non-profit child abuse prevention organization, told the Global Times.

The lack of professional skills and manpower is a grave problem, according to Tong Xiaojun, the vice director of the China Social Work Research Center at the China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing.

The baby hatch, also called a "safe island" for babies, is where abandoned children are sent to.

Before such facilities were established, many abandoned children were left to die on roadsides or the wilderness.

The baby hatch scheme was first introduced in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province in 2011 and 32 hatches have since been established so far, receiving over 1,000 abandoned babies since July 2013.

The halt to baby hatches reflects the lack of capacity in dealing with the arrival of a massive number of babies, Tong said.