Secrecy Begets Tragedy in Hungary

The young farmer’s wife never thought about murdering her newborn baby, she told police. Rather, an unspoken, centuries-old code of conduct in Hungary may have condemned the infant to death.

After putting down her toddler for a nap, the woman stumbled into the kitchen of her two-room farmhouse. Her bloated belly burned. She collapsed on a sofa. The baby came in minutes.

“I had to tear the umbilical cord myself,” the 25-year-old woman, identified under Hungarian law only as Mrs. K.L., told police. “After a few minutes the baby began to cry. I was startled and afraid, so I grabbed its throat and squeezed.”

The newborn fell silent. Mrs. K.L. drifted off to sleep. When she awoke, she stuffed the infant in a sack and tossed it down a barnyard outhouse. By the time her husband got home, she was busy doing household chores.

He asked nothing. She told nothing.

“It is most important to keep the secret,” said psychologist Judit Cseres of the Hungarian National Police. “It is a social game that is being played. The pregnant woman pretends she is not pregnant, and although her family and friends know it is not true, they respect the secret.”

The case of Mrs. K.L. is one of nearly 200 infanticides from the 1980s and early 1990s included in groundbreaking research by Cseres, who for many years worked at the Hungarian Child and Youth Protection Agency, the country’s main organization for dealing with unwanted and abused children.

Her study probes long-established links between infanticide and financial insecurity. But it also explores social practices in Hungary that in effect sanction a crime more commonly associated with other cultures--and is particularly astonishing in what was the former Eastern Bloc’s Cinderella story.

“Infanticide reveals a lot about the poor treatment of women in Hungary,” Cseres said. “Given the circumstances, it is an open question whether these women are criminals or victims.”

The completion of Cseres’ work, which is expected to be published next year, comes at a pivotal time. The number of reported infanticides in Hungary has jumped dramatically in recent years after dropping to a record low in 1989, when economic and political changes swept Eastern Europe.

Although police reported a slight decrease in killings last year, anecdotal evidence suggests the problem has not abated. In September, a 26-year-old woman allegedly wrapped her newborn in a blanket and set it ablaze; the woman’s mother found the charred bones.

“The numbers are increasing everywhere,” said Dr. Emoke Seress Toth, medical director of Agost Schoepf-Merei Hospital, a maternity center for poor women in a rundown Budapest neighborhood. “A lot of babies are being found in trash cans.”

According to police statistics, there were 26 confirmed cases of infanticide last year, well below the peak of 39 in 1983 but alarmingly higher than the 11 reported in 1989. Cseres, who compiled the data from crime files, said the actual numbers are perhaps 10 times greater because police seldom penetrate the veil of secrecy.

“If you chart the cases on a curve, you will see it is like a thermometer of Hungarian society,” Cseres said. “The optimism of 1988 and 1989 is gone, the time of change when everyone was planning a bright future and wanting to have children.”

Despite having shed their totalitarian and economically backward regime ahead of other Eastern Europeans, the continuing economic and political transformation has weighed heavily on Hungarians.

About a quarter of Hungary’s 2.5 million children are classified by state officials as “endangered,” primarily because of impoverished living conditions. The number has quadrupled since the end of communism, according to Miklos Radoszav, assistant director of the Child and Youth Protection Agency in Budapest.

“This is a very tragic process that we are going through right now,” said Radoszav, whose agency cares for 21,000 children in orphanages and other institutions. “It is being determined in the economy who will be the most miserable, who will be the middle class and who will be the richest. While we do this, there is no safety net.”

Unlike in India and China, two countries where some parents who want boys are known to kill newborn girls, infanticide in Hungary is not motivated by gender. Mrs. K.L. could not even tell police whether the baby she killed was male or female.

The desire to be rid of the newborn appears to be caused largely by financial and social reasons. But research shows the problem is not confined to the poorest Hungarians, nor is it an exclusively rural phenomenon.

With money tight, there is tremendous pressure on Hungarian women not to have large families, Radoszav and other experts say; a plummeting birthrate attests to the trend. But talking about sexual relations, especially in small towns, is such a social taboo in this mostly Roman Catholic country that many married couples never even broach the subject of family planning.

Use of birth control is irregular, sex education in schools is sporadic, and abortion, although widely available, is relatively expensive and unpopular in conservative rural areas, where 40% of Hungary’s 10 million people live. In response, Cseres’ research has concluded, a culture of secrecy or denial takes root when an unwanted child is conceived, especially out of wedlock.

The woman is expected to carry her secret alone. In the cases studied by Cseres, only 16% of the pregnant women even confided in their best friends, even though the pregnancy eventually became obvious. Mrs. K.L. repeatedly turned away a persistent maternity nurse, insisting she needed not prenatal help but cancer treatment.

All of the women in the Cseres study delivered their babies alone, sometimes with their families watching television in the next room.

“I was thinking maybe I should tell my mother that I was having so much pain, but when I stood up I felt the baby coming,” said Gyorgyi, a 17-year-old high school student in a statement to police. “I delivered the baby on my knees at my desk [in my room]. . . . He had such little fingers. I prayed. . . . I told myself, ‘Oh, God, please, this can’t be true!’ ”

The origins of the charade are difficult to discern. Cseres draws a comparison to the 16th century, when aristocratic landowners throughout Europe frequently impregnated domestic help. The servants would conceal their condition for fear of losing employment, and then kill the babies immediately upon giving birth. No questions asked.

The historic setting has changed, but the underlying circumstances in Hungary apparently have not.

“The tradition of secrecy is very strong in Hungary,” Cseres said. “I have seen cases where husbands, who have been sleeping with their wives during the nine months, testify they didn’t realize she was pregnant. Or mothers of young pregnant girls, who run into each other every morning in the bathroom, say they never suspected a thing.”

Researchers and social workers describe the situation as grossly dysfunctional, but they hold out little hope of changing the root causes.

“Society seems to tolerate problems more these days,” said Radoszav of the child protection agency, his office plastered with crayon drawings and photographs of unwanted children in the care of state institutions. “Years ago, if a child looked underfed, the schools would immediately call and say, ‘This child isn’t eating well. Something needs to be done.’ Now, we don’t hear a thing.”

In Poland, which is experiencing similar transformation pains, the per-capita rate of reported infanticides last year was half that of Hungary. Experts say comparisons are difficult, however, because many countries do not compile infanticide statistics, and available data are often impossible to verify.

A spokeswoman for the World Health Organization said there is anecdotal evidence of infanticide worldwide, but the U.N. agency does not compile statistics because countries are reluctant to reveal such information or lack the means to track it.

“It is not a subject people like to deal with,” Cseres said. “When I attend international conferences, my colleagues don’t even want to talk about it.”

Resigned to such realities, child advocates are trying to protect newborn babies by giving troubled mothers-to-be exactly what they so desperately seek: absolute secrecy.

In three separate programs, hospitals are beginning to offer free treatment to pregnant women, promising to maintain their confidentiality and facilitate adoption.

At the no-frills Schoepf-Merei, a heated incubator has been placed in a cramped entranceway for mothers to anonymously deposit infants. The suggestion of Budapest’s deputy mayor, the incubator follows in the age-old tradition of leaving unwanted babies on the steps of a church, said Seress Toth, the hospital’s medical director.

Although no one has made use of the incubator, four women have surrendered newborn babies to the hospital staff, and a fifth baby was taken by ambulance to the hospital after being abandoned at a church in suburban Budapest.

“The incubator has become mostly a symbol for mothers in distress,” said Seress Toth, whose century-old hospital is named after a Hungarian advocate for the poor and needy. “We always keep it warm, though, because we don’t know--maybe tomorrow someone will need it.”

In addition to the abandoned babies, 110 women have taken advantage of Schoepf-Merei’s confidential treatment for troubled mothers-to-be since the program started in May. Fifty-eight have given birth at the hospital, with about one-third of these women opting to keep their children. The other babies have been adopted by Hungarian families (laws in Hungary make foreign adoptions difficult).

“I am all for the program, because it means fewer children are ending up in garbage dumpsters,” said Barbara Csernus, 17, a patient in the Schoepf-Merei maternity ward, which is separate from the infanticide prevention program. “I have sympathy for the girls. They don’t have the circumstances or the strength to raise a child.”

In one emotional scene, a divorced woman in her 40s spent nearly three months in the hospital hiding from her two adult sons, hospital officials said. Ashamed of being unmarried, pregnant and with grown children, she had agreed to give up her newborn daughter for adoption.

But the woman’s sons suddenly appeared at her bedside last month, and in a tearful reunion urged their mother to keep their baby sister. She did.

“Our goal is to keep the child with its biological mother,” said Radoszav of the child protection agency, which provides counselors for the Schoepf-Merei program. “I think it is immoral to do otherwise.”