By VUYOLWETHU GWALA and BRONWYNNE JOOSTE
Durban Child Welfare has urged expectant mothers who do not want to keep their babies, to seek help instead of abandoning them.
According to Lisa Parsee, director of Durban and District Child Welfare, 66 abandoned babies were brought to the organisation during the 2009/10 financial year, and most of them were between birth and two years of age.
She added that there had been an increase in the abandoning of children in recent years due to the HIV pandemic, poverty and unplanned pregnancies by teenagers and prostitutes.
Parsee said that knowing a child's family history and circumstances made it easier for Child Welfare to find suitable homes for them, and that mothers also required counselling because "giving birth to a child and then abandoning it is surely emotionally damaging to any woman".
Mala Moodley, of the Pietermaritzburg Child and Family Welfare Society, said 29 abandoned children had been brought to their centre between August 2009 and August this year.
With most of these being newborns and HIV-positive, Moodley said that most women abandoned their babies because they lacked financial and psychological support.
"After the children are brought to us, it is our priority to find homes for them," she said, adding that sometimes mothers came back to reclaim their children.
However, the welfare body always weighed up whether giving the children back would be in the child's best interest.
Moodley said a 6-month-old baby was recently brought to them after he had been abandoned with strangers in town.
"The mother simply asked another lady to look after the baby while she went somewhere, and she never return-ed."
Cheryl Pratley, founder of Shepherd's Keep on the Bluff, a home for abandoned babies, said it was difficult to estimate how many children they received in a month because in some months it was more, and others less.
"At present we are looking after 15 babies."
Pratley said that the maintenance of the children was difficult, but through God's grace they managed to survive.
Shepherd's Keep is only meant to keep babies from birth to six months, but Pratley said it was sometimes difficult to find placement for the babies, especially those with special needs, and they had to keep them for longer.
The child welfare organisations said most babies were left at the hospital after birth, or left in places where they could be found. "It is rare that they are left in dustbins and similar places, unless the mother feels disconnected to the child," said Parsee.
Police spokesman Colonel Vincent Mdunge would not reveal how many children were abandoned in KwaZulu-Natal during the past year. He said they had not noticed an increase in the number of incidents, but the abandoning of babies remained a major concern in society.
According to Mdunge, the most recent case was reported two weeks ago when a newborn baby was found crying in a pit toilet at Inanda, Durban.
The baby was rescued and taken to a place of safety.
"People should understand the consequences of their actions when they throw babies in pit toilets. Concealment of birth is a serious crime," said Mdunge.
He also said the most common reasons for babies being abandoned was unplanned pregnancies and a lack of financial support, but emphasised that women had a lot of options open to them in dealing with such matters - but that these did not include committing a crime.
More than 500 babies were abandoned in Cape Town over a 12-month period, according to Cape Town Child Welfare.
Other child welfare organisations in the Mother City agreed that the number of cases was on the increase.
Police, too, have confirmed that they were recording cases of child abandonment, with four such cases being reported in the past two months. Two of these babies died.
In some cases, older babies were dumped. Many of these children were in good condition and had clearly been well looked after before being abandoned, according to representatives from children's homes.
In some cases, mothers left their babies at hospitals immediately after giving birth. They could not be traced because they had given hospitals false details.