(The entrance to the Office for Citizen Services)
The Office for Citizen Services in Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella is located on Carrer de les Ramelleres 17 next to Plaça de Viçenc Martorell. Big trees cast shade over the square and there are benches for people to rest. Adjacent to the Office for Citizen Services stands the Municipal Council building.
In the evening and at night, the square fills up with drug addicts. In the morning, the addicts are ushered away by the city police before the councillors arrive at work.
Only the used needles are left behind.
Social problems are not a novel aspect of life in the square. The building housing the Office for Citizen Services dates back to the 16th century, when it was an orphanage by the name La Casa de la Misericordia (the house of mercy). Today nothing remains of the orphanage except for two easily missed indentations in the wall next to the entrance; a narrow aperture much like the slot in a piggy bank and a larger round wooden frame containing a rotating wooden cylinder within.
(The foundling wheel and slot for donations)
The wooden frame with the cylinder is called a foundling wheel. This is where mothers (or far less frequently fathers) would leave new-born babies they were unable to care for. On the inside was a small room with a cot and a bed where a nun would sleep, ready to take care of any abandoned infants that appeared through the foundling wheel (usually in the dead of night). The little slot next to the wheel was for donations to the nunnery to help support the orphanage.
The concept of a foundling wheel dates back more than eight hundred years. The first known example is from a hospital in Marseilles, France, in 1188. Apparently, the nuns running the hospital wanted to please Pope Innocent III, who, it was said, was distressed by the large number of new-born babies found drowned in the Tiber in Rome.
The Industrial Revolution saw a dramatic rise in Spanish rural-urban migration accompanied by a surge in the number of illegitimate children. Thousands of babies passed through Ciutat Vella’s foundling wheel until it was finally closed in 1931. The vast majority of these children died, because the nunnery did not have sufficient resources to care for them.
The few lucky survivors were named after a saint and given the surname Exposito. The boys became shopkeepers and the girls domestic servants.
Babies continue to be abandoned in all countries of the world to this day, although statistics are difficult to come by. In Denmark, 1.7 infants are abandoned for every 100,000 births, while the number in Slovakia is far higher at 4.9 per 1,000 live births. For this reason, many countries continue to offer modern versions of foundling wheels called baby hatches. They include: Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.
Modern baby hatches are usually located in hospitals or social centres, or sometimes in churches. A door or flap in an outside wall opens onto a soft bed, heated or at least insulated. Sensors indicate when a baby has arrived.
Babies are abandoned for many reasons. Religion and other types of superstition, poverty, social customs, illness and disability as well as lack of appropriate social services are probably the main reasons. In some countries, babies are still abandoned if they are born out of wedlock. In other countries, new-born babies are given away as an alternative to female infanticide, or if demands for dowry are excessive. In wealthier countries, new-borns are abandoned by drug addicts, prostitutes, the mentally ill, the homeless, or those facing incarceration or deportation. In other words, all tend to be extremely vulnerable people.
Countries that place limits on the number of children, such as China, tend to see a greater prevalence of abandonment among girls and children with congenital disorders or other disabilities.
Baby hatches have become far more widespread in the United States after the 2022 Supreme Court decision to allow states to prohibit abortion. By contrast, France and Austria have been able to reduce the number of new-borns left in baby hatches by allowing women to give birth anonymously in hospitals and leave their baby there. The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the right to give birth anonymously.
Still, baby hatches are controversial. Some argue that the Right of Children to know who they are is compromised as babies left in hatches rarely ever discover the identities of their parents.
In my humble opinion, baby hatches are very much a second-best solution open to criticism on the same grounds as charity, namely that they facilitate a dereliction of duty on the part of the government to provide proper and complete care for people whose vulnerability is so great that they are forced to abandon their own offspring.
The End
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