Help line besieged at baby-hatch hospital

Noriko Sakakibara / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The Yomiuri Shimbun
September 7, 2007
Source: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20070907TDY03001.htm

Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto, which has been making headlines for the baby hatch it set up in May, also has been flooded with phone calls from people seeking help with unwanted pregnancies.

The hospital started the telephone counseling service prior to opening the baby hatch, into which parents can deposit babies they feel unable to raise.

Many of those seeking help were youths and unmarried people facing unwanted pregnancies. Since late last year, the hospital has received more than 400 such calls.

About 70 percent of the calls were from outside Kumamoto Prefecture, indicating that facilities for such consultations are lacking nationwide.

Sources close to the baby-hatch operation say that seven babies or toddlers have so far been deposited there, though the hospital has not released any official figures to protect privacy. One of the seven children was later returned to the parents.

The baby hatch has caused a nationwide sensation, with some criticizing it as encouraging the abandonment of babies. But the hospital has met with an equally dramatic response to its counseling program, which has had staffers working around the clock to meet demand.

The hospital started operating the 24-hour telephone counseling service in December, partly to help minimize the number of parents who have to resort to using the baby hatch.

In one of the calls, a panicked woman whose contractions had begun sought help saying: "I'm in labor. Help me!" The caller was a high school girl who called just before her delivery, and who had not even told her parents of her pregnancy.

A hospital official replied: "You're right to call us. Wait for me and I'll come over right away." The official rushed to the site by car and brought the girl and her newborn baby to the hospital.

When the official called the girl's home to notify her parents, they refused to believe what they were told, saying they had not noticed any physical change in their daughter.

Yukiko Tajiri, chief nurse at the hospital, said: "There have been three similar cases so far. When we can't get to where the caller is, we contact someone who can."

The fame of the baby hatch seems to be one reason why the hospital receives so many calls on such serious matters. The help-seekers often say they cannot tell their parents of their pregnancies, or have gone to full-term merely because they were unable to find the money for an abortion. One caller said her fiance had disappeared, leaving her with no money to deliver or raise her baby.

The flood of calls indicates that many young people do not have any support network they can turn to for help and advice with such problems. A source at the hospital said, "Many of them called in the expectation that this hospital would be able to help them."

The hospital had received more than 400 such calls by the end of August. Calls came from as far afield as Hokkaido and Okinawa Prefecture.

The source said the hospital had handed nearly 10 babies to foster parents under a special adoption system after confirming the parents' identities and ascertaining that there were good reasons why they could not raise the children.

In addition to the Jikei Hospital phone service, and coinciding with the opening of the baby hatch, the Kumamoto city government also launched its own around-the-clock telephone pregnancy counseling service--the first such service by a municipal government anywhere in the nation.

The service received 301 calls in the first three months. About 80 percent of the callers sought help with unwanted pregnancies or difficulties in raising children.

A city government official in charge of the counseling said, "We hadn't expected such a large number of calls. Bodies that offer this kind of service are in short supply across the nation."

For women worried about pregnancy and childbirth, prefectural child consultation centers and those in major cities, municipal health care centers and municipal centers for women's health offer consultation services. But the existence of the facilities is not necessarily well known.

In Germany, for example, there are public centers offering help with pregnancy-related problems. In Japan, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry says there are only a few public bodies that can offer women help with unwanted pregnancies.

A ministry official said: "There are four facilities operated by the central government that offer free consultation. But there is no aid for people who can't afford delivery costs, or direct assistance to mothers and babies."

Many of the callers to Jikei Hospital also said they had found a lack of organizations from which they could seek help.

One of the callers said: "I went to a child welfare center for consultation, but all they could say was 'You must raise the baby. What other choice is there?'" Another said, "In one public office, they just passed me from one section to another, and I ended up getting no help at all."

In August, the Kumamoto prefectural and city governments decided to set up a committee to look into the operation of the baby hatch and the counseling line.

A city government official said: "We've had calls from people all over the nation who found out about the service on the Internet. We want the central government to see that this isn't just a problem for Kumamoto Prefecture."

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Teen sex problem

In recent years, there have been cases of minors killing or abandoning their newborn babies as a result of unwanted pregnancies.

This is thought to be connected to the ever-younger age at which people have sexual intercourse for the first time, and the increasing number of pregnancies among unmarried women.

The percentage of high school girls between ages 16 and 19 who are sexually experienced has been rising sharply over the past 20 years, hitting 28.3 percent in fiscal 2006, according to ministry figures. Other data show that 1.7 percent of 19-year-old women have had an abortion.

An expert panel at the ministry that examined child abuse cases reported in June that 25 percent of all children under 3 who were killed by their parents were born as a result of an unwanted pregnancies.

(Sep. 7, 2007)