Babies Abandoned In South Africa

Outside the Berea Baptist Mission Church, in one of the most crime-ridden streets in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, there’s a ‘baby bin’.
A bit like a clothing recycling bin on a UK high street, it consists of a hatch in the church wall, covered by a metal flap labelled ‘Door of Hope’, where desperate mothers can come, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to leave tiny children they haven’t the money, health or support to care for.
Sixteen babies are routinely dumped in the box behind the flap every month (about the same number that are abandoned in the UK in a whole year).
The baby bin was installed in 1999 by the church’s pastor Cheryl Allen, after she realised that newborns were being left by their mothers to die in toilets, rubbish bins, in fields and out in the bush.
It is estimated that 50 children are dumped each month in Johannesburg alone, and there are even cases of babies in refuse bags being tossed on to highways, to be run over by cars.
The Johannesburg baby bin was created as a way for women to at least abandon their children as safely as possible.

Three babies are dumped every 48 hours in KwaZulu-Natal province, where Durban is the largest city.
Shepherd’s Keep Orphanage does not have a baby bin, but its staff work closely with the Durban police, who bring them abandoned babies found in the area.
Lots of babies, found in toilets and in plastic bags, are botched abortions.
Despicable people are advertising abortions for women who are as much as seven months pregnant.
A mother takes a pill to induce early labour and thinks that she has aborted her foetus, but she hasn’t – she has given birth to a living, breathing baby, tied it up in a plastic bag and left it for dead.
Others are clearly left in the hope that someone will find and care for them – near a church or hospital, with their belongings neatly packed.

South Africa is home to the highest number of people living with HIV in the world, and half the population is below the poverty line.
The combination of these two factors makes the abandonment of newborns by their mothers a horrifying common occurrence.
And it is predicted that the number of abandoned children will rise drastically nine months after the football world cup.
Many of them will be born to prostitutes who are unable to support them.