Italy has made a policy matter of creating hatches for people to abandon their children, on what the Family Affairs Minister describes as the “modern-day foundling wheels” plan. Better lives for the children in many cases of course. But the process and its broad adoption (no pun intended) begins to edge toward sanctioning the abandonment of children by those who should be required to put them up for adoption, and the fact that often such parents would (ala the New Jersey Dumpster Baby Epidemic) literally leave their children to the elements or kill them outright doesn’t change that reality. These “windows of mercy” are a poor substitute for public assistance to poor parents.
[Hat tip: Bill Soucy, Mac Genius and the Brains of the AMBI Computer Network]
Labels: adoption, child abandonment, Italy