Child abandonment

• 1. Introduction

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  Child abandonment is one of the oldest recorded human practices, documented in legal codes, religious texts, fairy tales, and court records across every era of recorded history. In France around 1830, five percent of all births ended in a child being surrendered to a foundling home. That figure is not a record of individual cruelty. It is a measure of desperation. What drives a parent to leave a child behind? What happens to the children who survive? And why do some of the most beloved stories in human culture return, again and again, to the figure of the foundling? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Legal Landscape

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  In the United States, child abandonment is classified as a class 4 felony, and a second offense after a prior conviction rises to a class 3 felony. All fifty states and the District of Columbia have carved out an important exception: laws permitting a parent to surrender a child at a designated safe haven without facing prosecution. Safe haven laws passed in the United States in 1999 and have since been adopted in Canada, Japan, France, and Slovakia. As of 2017, those laws had been used to surrender 3,317 babies in the United States alone.

  In the UK, leaving a child under two years of age is a criminal offense. In 2004, forty-nine babies were abandoned nationwide, with slightly more boys than girls among them. In Malaysia, the numbers are starker. Between 2005 and 2011, 517 babies were dumped, and of those, 287 were found dead. In 2012, at least one child was thrown from the window of a high-rise apartment.

  In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Georgia law distinguishing between willful abandonment within the state, classified as a misdemeanor, and abandonment followed by leaving the state, a felony. A parent had argued the law infringed on the constitutional right to travel. The court disagreed. The case reflects the persistent legal challenge of balancing parental rights against the direct harm to a child who becomes, in many such cases, a ward of the state.

  In 2015, state legislator Justin Harris of Arkansas made national headlines by rehoming two young adopted children using means that were still legal in Arkansas at the time. The episode renewed calls for federal legislation to close the gap left by inconsistent state laws.

• 3. Causes and Consequences

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  Poverty is the most consistent driver of child abandonment across time and geography. People in countries with weak social welfare systems who cannot financially support a child are more likely to abandon one, particularly if they already have children they are struggling to feed. The source material points to China, Myanmar, Mexico, and the United States as countries where this pattern is documented.

  Social stigma operates alongside financial pressure. In communities where teenage or single parents face strong disapproval, abandonment rates are higher. Children born outside of marriage may be abandoned to protect a family from community shame. In cultures where the sex of a child carries heavy significance, parents sometimes abandon a baby of the undesired sex. Political upheaval adds another layer: war displaces families, and incarceration or deportation can result in involuntary separation even when a parent had no intention of abandoning a child.

  Disownment is a distinct form of abandonment that can occur when a child is older. Reasons documented in the source include divorce, the discovery of a child's true paternity, a child's criminal behavior, teenage pregnancy, major religious or ideological differences, and a child identifying as LGBT.

  The effects on children who survive abandonment are serious and lasting. Documented consequences include low self-esteem, separation anxiety, difficulty forming emotional attachments, and a cluster of symptoms associated with what is sometimes called abandoned child syndrome, which can include depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders. Some children meet the diagnostic criteria for reactive attachment disorder or disinhibited social engagement disorder. Children left in dangerous places such as dumpsters or doorsteps face immediate physical risk from exposure and injury. In 2015, the United States government spent over nine billion dollars to support the 427,910 children then in foster care.

• 4. Historical Patterns

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  "Infant exposure" is the historical term for what we now call child abandonment. Across many ancient cultures, infants were left on hillsides, near churches, and in the wilderness. Some were taken in as free family members; others were enslaved. Roman families, notably, often chose enslaved people rather than relatives to raise their children, reflecting a degree of emotional distance from their offspring. The Christian writer Tertullian, in his Apology, described exposure as a crueler form of killing than direct infanticide, characterizing it as death by cold, hunger, and dogs. Ancient sources, however, suggest that contemporaries viewed the two practices as morally distinct.

  In the Early Middle Ages, parents who could not raise a child could surrender the child to a monastery, a practice called oblation, typically accompanied by a small fee. Monasteries received large numbers of children during periods of social stress. By the High Middle Ages, this practice had become less common and more private. Medieval hospitals sometimes cared for abandoned children at community expense, though some refused, reasoning that willingness to accept such children would encourage more abandonment.

  Medieval law often awarded the labor of a recovered child to whoever had taken the child in. The Visigothic Code, for example, prescribed that the person who took up an abandoned child was entitled to that child's service as a slave. When war or plague left large numbers of children parentless at once, the children became wards of the state, military organizations, or religious institutions, and their absorption into those structures helped preserve cultural and religious continuity.

  The largest single migration of abandoned children in recorded history occurred in the United States between 1853 and 1929. Over 120,000 orphans, not all of whom had been intentionally abandoned, were transported west on railroad cars in what became known as the orphan trains. Families agreed to take the children in exchange for their labor as farmhands and household workers. The exploitation and complications that followed gave rise to new agencies and legislation promoting adoption over indenture, and by 1945, adoption had been formally established as a legal act guided by the child's best interests. Charles Loring Brace introduced the practice of sealing adoption and birth records to prevent children from being reclaimed by their original families, which became the origin of closed adoption in America.

• 5. Policy as Cause

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  China's one-child policy, introduced in 1979, set financial penalties and service denials for families that had more than one child. Women were compelled to receive an IUD after a first birth and to undergo tubal ligation after a second. Over more than three decades, hundreds of thousands of children were abandoned as a result, the majority of them girls. Non-governmental organizations stepped in to arrange international adoptions, and more than 120,000 Chinese children were adopted abroad. Since the policy ended, China's fertility rate has risen, but only by 0.04 births per family, still below the replacement rate.

  Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu offers a parallel experiment with opposite policy levers. To build what Ceausescu described as a robust and young population, he banned abortion and contraception for most women through Decree 770. Women over forty, those who had already borne four or five children, those with life-threatening pregnancy complications, and those who had become pregnant through rape or incest were exempted. Romania's birth rate nearly doubled in the years that followed. But the resources to support that population were not available, and thousands of children were abandoned or left to die. Other women sought unsafe abortions performed by people without medical training. The crisis persisted until Ceausescu was overthrown in 1989. Romania's birth rate has since declined to 1.52 births per woman.

  During and after the Vietnam War, an estimated 50,000 babies were born to American fathers and Vietnamese mothers. These children, locally called children of the dust, were often unwanted because of the circumstances of their birth or simply impossible to care for in a war-torn country. Operation Babylift, established by the U.S. government, brought more than 3,300 children to Western countries for adoption, though not all of them were orphaned or abandoned. Non-governmental organizations attempted further international adoptions but were largely ineffective at the scale required. Efforts to connect American veterans with children they may have fathered in Vietnam continue to this day.

• 6. Prevention and Safe Surrender

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  Anonymous birthing allows a mother to give birth without disclosing her identity or accepting any legal claim over the child. Countries implementing it wait between two and eight weeks before placing the child for adoption, leaving time for a mother to return and reclaim the child. Austria passed a law in 2001 allowing anonymous birthing and free delivery, and police there reported a fifty-seven percent drop in neonaticides afterward. France implements the practice with counseling and information about available support, so that mothers are informed of their options before making a final decision.

  Baby boxes offer a different mechanism: a safe, anonymous drop point, typically for newborns. They are found in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, and the United States. The boxes guarantee that a child left inside will be found and cared for, and they allow a greater degree of anonymity than hospital-based surrender. Critics note that they are costly to operate, are sometimes used for children who already have injuries or health problems, and may be inaccessible to mothers in rural areas who are not willing to travel.

  Access to contraception and abortion also bears on abandonment rates. Evidence cited in the source shows that when bans on abortion are lifted, rates of abandoned, abused, and neglected children fall. In the United States, however, access remains severely uneven: eighty-seven percent of all counties, and ninety-seven percent of all rural counties, have no access to abortion services. Government counseling, post-natal support, mental health services, and community assistance for at-risk parents round out the prevention toolkit, addressing the financial, social, and medical conditions that most often precede abandonment.

• 7. The Foundling in Culture

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  Among the earliest surviving examples of child abandonment in literature is the story of Oedipus, left to die as an infant in the hills, found by a shepherd, and raised in ignorance of his origins until that ignorance destroyed him. The biblical Moses was placed in a reed basket on the Nile by his mother, discovered by the queen of Egypt, and raised to a position of power his birth family could never have given him. The pattern appears in Persian legend with Cyrus II, and in Roman myth with Romulus and Remus, who were nursed by a wolf before a shepherd found them.

  In Greek and Roman literature, abandoned children were almost always recognized by birth tokens left with them at the time of exposure. In Euripides's Ion, Creusa is on the verge of killing Ion, believing him to be her husband's illegitimate son, when a priestess reveals the tokens proving Ion is her own abandoned child. Longus's Daphnis and Chloe follows a similar arc, though with a happier resolution than Oedipus.

  Medieval literature and fairy tales absorbed the motif and gave it new shapes. In Hansel and Gretel, poverty and a stepmother's pressure combine to send the children into the forest. In Babes in the Wood, a wicked uncle orders the children killed; they are abandoned instead and die, their bodies covered by robins. Snow White is abandoned by a servant who was ordered to kill her. In Angelo F. Coniglio's historical fiction novella The Lady of the Wheel, the title refers to a receiver of foundlings who were placed in a device built into the wall of a church or hospital.

  Henry Fielding made the foundling the center of one of the first novels recognized as such: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. George Eliot's character Eppie in Silas Marner discovers her true father at the novel's end but chooses to remain with the man who actually raised her. Shakespeare returned to the theme twice: in The Winter's Tale, recognition tokens prove Perdita is a king's daughter; in The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser reveals that the character Pastorella, raised by shepherds, is of noble birth.

  The pattern persists in modern media. Superman is a foundling raised by Kansas farmers who later discovers his alien origins and uses his inherited power for good. Robert A. Heinlein's 1957 novel Citizen of the Galaxy follows Thorby, a foundling sold as a slave, who eventually discovers his parents were killed for opposing the very conglomerate he now inherits. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, studying the Zuni, found that child abandonment was unknown in their actual practice, yet it featured heavily in their folktales, suggesting that even cultures without the practice have found the abandoned child a compelling figure for storytelling.