South Africa’s Special-Delivery Babies

Baby Andrew appeared one day through the large mail slot at the church’s Door of Hope. He wore only a diaper marked “Johannesburg Hospital.”

His slight weight on a cushioned metal box triggered a buzzer. Staff quickly fetched the live parcel, wrapped him in warm clothing and put him firmly on life’s uncertain path.

In a city where about a dozen infants a year are found dead after being left in a garbage bin or out in the open, one church has turned to the baby chute as a way to save lives.

Since August, four newborns have been dropped anonymously through the oversized mail slot cut in the security wall at the Berea Baptist Mission Church in Hillbrow, a rough, downtrodden neighborhood where gunshots echo even in daylight.

South African law calls for up to five years’ imprisonment for child abandonment. But police say they tolerate the Door of Hope operation because it’s preferable to risking a baby’s life.

“It is traumatic enough giving up your baby without feeling the police are coming to get you,” said Cheryl Allen, a nurse-midwife and pastor who heads the Door of Hope.

“We try to put them up for adoption,” she said. But if the babies are not adopted, the church and its members intend to raise the children.

“To me it is a sacred trust. When they bring the baby to me, they’re giving it to the church,” Allen said.

Welfare officials question Allen’s approach because it complicates adoption procedures by failing to get mothers’ release of adoption rights.

“I have mixed feelings about the Door of Hope,” said Kay McCrindle at the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society. “While I admire their efforts to protect children who are literally being left, I think in the long run it’s not the best option for the child.”

Allen said an additional 10 infants have arrived at the Door of Hope since August, either in the arms of their mothers, who usually signed over adoption rights, or with hospital workers. An 18-month-old girl also was dropped off for temporary care while the mother sorted out her life.

Door of Hope has room to care for six babies. Allen enlists friends and others in the religious community to provide temporary places for excess numbers until their adoption status can be sorted out. She would like to build an orphanage for 200 children, but the government’s emphasis is now on foster care.

To spread the word about the Door of Hope, the church distributed pamphlets and posters with a large X over a garbage can. The paper shows how to tie off the umbilical cord and guarantees anonymity.

South Africa has nearly 1.8 million abandoned children of all ages, a 75% increase over 1990, the South African National Council for Child and Family Welfare says.

Decades of apartheid laws forced men to leave their villages for jobs and eroded the traditional African extended family. Further erosion has come from Africa’s AIDS epidemic, with nearly 10% of the country’s 42 million people estimated to be infected with the AIDS virus.

Andrew, the baby who arrived in the slot in late November, is HIV positive. Babies infected with the virus usually are transferred to special shelters because they are hard to place in foster homes.

But Andrew miraculously found a temporary home in Pretoria.

Pam and Bill Rapier, American missionaries from Colorado Springs, Colo., had for years resisted pleas from their grown children to adopt a baby, saying grandchildren would fulfill that need someday.

Then they heard Andrew needed a home. It was a message from God, Pam said.