This is not the time to play games with the lives of babies

It is obvious that the coronavirus pandemic and the severe measures taken to contain it, including our multilevel lockdown, have had severe and often unintended consequences for the most vulnerable members of our society.

As we report today, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) involved in adoptions and caring for abandoned babies say the incidents of infants being deserted by their mothers have increased during the lockdown.

This is because the shutdown of the economy has exacerbated the already horrifying poverty in our country. Often, these desperate mothers feel they cannot afford to raise a baby and have no alternative but to abandon them.

While it would be easy to sit on the comfortable sidelines and slam these women as being heartless and uncaring at best, or murderers at worst (because many of the abandoned infants do not survive), one should pause for thought.

To what depths of despair must a human being, who has carried a new life within her for nine months, have sunk to be prepared to dump that part of her and simply walk away?

Interestingly, the government doesn’t think that there has been a spike in the numbers of babies being dumped. Social development spokesperson Lumka Oliphant said the department had no record of the increase of child abandonment cases and no reports of these from the NGO sector.

We wonder why the NGOs we spoke to – whose information came from surveys of groups involving in caring for babies – would want to not report such cases.

On the other hand, a surge in abandoned babies would make the government look even worse in the eyes of the public, which is already becoming increasingly disenchanted with the lockdown.

This is not the time to play games – of whatever sort – with the lives of babies.

They need just one thing: love.

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