China has a serious problem with its children. Given China’s controversial one child policy and the Chinese preference for healthy baby boys, there is a huge problem in the country with child abandonment. Any child with medical issues, especially girls, are oftentimes abandoned and left for dead in China’s streets. That’s a horrible fate for any little one to undergo, especially medically fragile babies, and so China opened up 25 “baby hatches” to allow a humane way to get children into the orphanage system, but the demand has been crushing. A Chinese baby hatch in Guangzhou, China, closed after unprecedented demand.
The adoption scheme only started in January, but 262 babies have been donated thus far into the climate-controlled, comfortable baby hatches, which has pushed the 1000-strong orphanage to the breaking point. Given that most of the children have cerebral palsy, heart conditions, and other physical and medical ailments that require special treatment, that’s a lot of resources that the facility needs to find, and that means that the baby hatches are closing, for now.
“I hope everyone understands the difficulties the welfare center faces,” said Xu Jin, the director of the facility. “We are temporarily closing the center [to new babies] so that we can properly care for the infants already at the center.”
Tags: xu jiu, baby hatches, chinese baby hatches forced to close, chinese baby hatch, abandoned babies in china, Guangzhou, china, orphanage, child abandonment, china baby hatch scheme, children, one child policy