Abandoned Children

“A Warm, Safe Place for Unwanted Babies” (Jan. 28), about providing a safe alternative to abandoning babies, sounds like a compassionate solution until we consider that the rising incidence in the murder and abandonment of infants is directly related to the decline in welfare and family services.

In the 18th century, when abandonment and murder of infants were epidemic, foundling hospitals installed turnstiles where mothers could anonymously deposit their babies. Because of the low survival rate of infants in those hospitals, they began to farm out babies to wet nurses. Mothers quickly learned how to deposit their babies in the hospitals and then retrieve their own babies to nurse them with the allowance. The authorities quickly decided that it would be far cheaper to pay the mothers to raise their own children, initiating the modern welfare system.

We have to ask, wouldn’t it be more sensible to pay the real mothers to raise their children, rather than foster homes to care for children? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to have a society in which no mother would ever think of abandoning a child? Considering that maternal attachment is the strongest human emotion, we can hardly imagine the level of stress and anxiety that forces a mother to abandon or kill her infant.

WILLIAM H. DuBAY

Costa Mesa