Box-a-Bye Baby

So I found this story on the BBC about Baby Boxes; boxes designed to keep infants alive so that their mothers can drop them off into the care of professionals without needing to perform a warm handoff to another human being, who might ask uncomfortable questions, know the person involved or cause other complications that the presumably desperate parent is anxious enough to avoid that their efforts to do so may place the child's life in jeopardy. While I'd never heard of the concept before landing at the story online, this is an international phenomenon and one that goes back to the middle ages.

Of course, not everyone is a fan. The BBC doesn't spend much time speaking to people's objections to the concept, but it does take a moment to toss out this mostly throwaway line:

Fathers' rights groups object, saying they allow only one parent to make the decision.

And, me being me, that was the line that caught my attention.

Back when I was a child and youth care worker, and then a foster-care case worker, I'd developed a rather low opinion of the men who were the fathers of the children that I worked with. While I'm not going to claim that they were a representative sample, only one of the children appeared to have a father who cared about them more than their mother did; and the mother in question was a remarkable piece of work, the sort made sterilizing people unless they qualify for a parenting license seem like a good idea. Typically, if a child was only going to have a single parent ever show up for anything, it was going to be the mother. But the idea that nearly the entire gamut of these mostly low-income (if not simply unemployed) men were of the infamous "love 'em and leave 'em" type was uncharitable, and I've mellowed as I've grown old.

So while it's easy to dismiss the concerns of fathers' rights groups as disingenuous or even actively dishonest, I do find myself wondering about the circumstances that prevent men from being more available to the women who bear, but cannot bear to keep, their children. And how many of those circumstances could be prevented if either or both parties had more access to support. To be sure, I understand that men can simply walk away from a responsibility that they don't want. But I wonder how many of them find that they're effectively pushed away.

I'm curious as to what the actual, verbatim, objections of fathers' rights groups to drop-off boxes for infants is, because the irony of "saying they allow only one parent to make the decision," is not lost on me. Back in the day, I worked with a number of single mothers who didn't have a choice in no longer being with their child(ren)'s father. He had simply disappeared, and that was that.

I understand the objections that people have to the boxes. The UN's objection, that nations would do better to address the factors that cause people to give up their infants, is well taken. The boxes are, like any number of other things, a means of making a broken system less damaging, rather than less broken. But I don't think that many people are willing to do what would need to be done to repair that particular system, which I suspect has been damaged by the technological and social progress of the past several decades (or even the last century or so).

And in that respect, the concept is here to stay. Everyone will have to become used to it.