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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Boxed in: S Korea child law sees more babies abandoned

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The young woman laboured up the steps, past brightly decorated walls akin to a child’s nursery, her daughter in her arms. Opening a hatch in the wall, she put her inside, turned around and walked away.


She ran her hands over her head but did not look back, surveillance camera footage showed. She may never see the girl again.


South Korea has become Asia’s fourth-largest economy and a member of the OECD club of developed countries.


Around 110,000 South Koreans have been adopted to the United States alone since the 1950s but numbers have fallen in recent years.


Birth rates have plummeted to the world’s lowest. But the number of abandoned babies has jumped in recent years in the wake of a law intended to protect children.


The woman in the video footage was among the latest of more than 1,000 to have made their way to a house in a working-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Seoul.


Converted into a shelter by a small church, a temperature-controlled chamber built into the wall functions as a baby box, enabling unwanted newborns to be taken in without parents having to identify themselves.


Almost 200 last year, an average of nearly four a week, are deposited, sometimes with the umbilical cord still attached.


Pastor Lee Jong-Rak of the Jusarang Community Church set up the facility after hearing reports of babies being abandoned in the open air or in public restrooms, where they risked dying of hypothermia.


In 2010, its first year of operations, just four babies were placed in the box. At the time, South Korean women who wanted to give up unwanted babies were obliged to give adoption agencies their written consent, but often gave false details or no records, and operators looked the other way.


But two years later, the country adopted a law banning adoption agencies accepting undocumented babies, in line with the Hague Convention, which aims to give adoptive children the right to trace their birth parents. In 2013, 224 babies were abandoned at the centre.


The box operates in a legal grey area.


Authorities are fully aware of it, and the welfare ministry neither supports it nor opposes it as, according to official Kim Hye-Ji, “it saves the lives of newborn babies”.


Now Seoul says it aims to ratify the Hague Convention, which says children should preferably be adopted by families in their home country, by the end of the year. — AFP


Park Chan-Kyong


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