Baby box
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By Choi Tae-hwan
“Ding-dong!” when the small church’s bell rings it indicates the arrival of an infant that has just been left in the baby box. The members then get themselves ready to take in yet another unwanted child.
Jeong Byeong-ok, wife of Lee Jong-rak, the church’s pastor of the church is in-charge of taking the abandoned baby into the church’s shelter and her husband is responsible for counseling the mothers who abandon their babies.
Lee currently offers shelter and raises 19 children ranging in ages from 4 to 34. They live as a family and on the first day of 2014, they all came together to take a family picture.
Lee set up the church in 1999 following the experience of caring for a disabled son. He was convinced of the importance of the church ministering to vulnerable people. In 2007, he made a baby box to save abandoned children from the streets dying of hypothermia and also to offer them with warm affection.
It was heartbreaking to hear of an unmarried teenage mother being charged with giving birth to a baby in a restroom and then throwing her child through a window to its death. She reportedly did so to prevent her family from knowing that she had a child out of wedlock.
Pastor Lee’s church reached out to this poor teenage mother and counseled her to enable her overcome her ordeal. She also admitted during the counseling session that she was so scared of lacking the ability to raise the child as a single mother.
There are several reported cases of unmarried mothers, supported by the church, who after putting their children into the baby box, returned to reclaim them after they gained sufficient means to provide for them.
The number of children left in baby boxes is on the increase up to around 20 a month. This was after a special law that allows for the adoption of a baby with a birth certificate ― was legislated to promote adoptions in August 2012. Ironically, the baby box concept is becoming controversial.
Some people are against the baby box because it has led to an increase in the number of abandoned babies. On the other hand, others are in favor of it because it keeps unmarried mothers who are forced to give up caring for their children and thus saving deserted babies. What do you think about the pros and cons over the necessity of the baby box?
It is true that unmarried mothers and their babies are not protected in our society economically and socially due to the absence of an effective welfare system to cater to them. Needles to say Korea for years was regarded as one of the major baby exporting countries. How has the baby box concept impacted this trend?
Now is the time for us to pay more attention to the seriousness of the challenges faced by unmarried mothers and their babies deserted on the street by taking into consideration the side effects of the legislation of the special adoption law and the effectiveness of the government’s welfare policies.
The writer is an English teacher at Jeonnam Middle School in Gwangju. His email address is cth0707@hanmail.net.