Drowning the Babies in the Bathwater (Part I)

After a few years of writing columns like this, you start to understand what makes people continue reading after the first few sentences, and what makes them quickly turn to another article, or just stop reading altogether. For example, if I were to write the phrase "The looming demographic crisis," your eyes would immediately glaze over, and before I could finish with "facing Hungary," you'd be gone, probably never to return. But if I started with the spectacular compound word csecsemőgyilkosság and then told you that it meant "baby-murder," I could probably fill two pages and still have your undivided attention. So let's start with csecsemőgyilkosság and move on from there.

In brief, there seems to be a bit of a csecsemőgyilkosság problem in Hungary, and I am not talking about abortion. Two weeks ago Thursday, a newborn boy was found in a trash bag at a dump in Péteri, in Pest County, by a trash-picker. (Yes, such things as trash-pickers exist in Hungary as well.) The boy, who had been born live, died that morning or the previous night, either from being suffocated, or just from a lack of care. Police found a bloody red-and-white striped T-shirt at the scene, along with a tablecloth, a towel, and a duvet cover, and have started an investigation.

It will not be their first such investigation. I read about another dead newborn found in a bush in Tatabanya, one in a garbage bin in Nagykőrös, and one in a place I've forced myself to forget. (Okay, it was a latrine - see if you can forget that, ever.) In fact, according to one Hungarian NGO, there is a baby-murder in Hungary every two weeks. Which means that, if statistics were our destiny, there will be another little miracle smothered, tossed out a window or just left to die somewhere in Hungary by sometime this Thursday.

As a result of what looked like a growing crisis of csecsemőgyilkosság, the law was recently changed to make the punishment for baby murder the same or more severe as for the murder of adults. Two such prosecutions are currently in the works, and the mothers -or whatever you want to call them - may face life behind bars. A few years ago, the maximum was two years in prison.

A "last act of care"?: By providing incubators for mothers to drop off their unwanted children, Hungarian hospitals may be feeding the country's crisis of child-rearing

An even more extreme measure - at least in my mind - was taken in response to an earlier wave of baby-murders. Back in 1996, hospitals around the country began installing incubators into which reluctant mothers could drop off their unwanted babies without running the risk of killing them. While it may seem like a newfangled or even space-age idea, the basic concept apparently goes back to the middle ages, when the church made it known that it would keep an eye out for superfluous sucklings ditched on the cathedral steps.

As usual, I'm probably being too harsh. According to web portal www.babaszoba.hu, ("baby room") 200 women kill themselves in Hungary every year due to unwanted pregnancy. Officials at Schöpf-Mérei have even been quoted as arguing that placing a baby in the incubator isn't actually abandonment, but a "last act of taking care."
I suppose that's true, at least compared to dropping the kid off at the dump. The aband... I mean spontaneously de-parented babies are apparently well cared-for at the hospital and then quickly put up for adoption. One nurse at the hospital said the babies are "very serious and sad in the first week, but in the second week all of them start to communicate and smile."

I'd like to smile as well, but it's difficult. For one thing, there are enormous moral hazards implicit in making baby abandonment - yes, it is abandonment - convenient and relatively risk-free. Zita Budavári, head of a pro-adoption and pregnancy crisis NGO called the Cradle Foundation , argues that, in the hours of shock following a secret or otherwise unplanned birth, most mothers are not in any position to make a rational decision about whether to keep or give away their new child. Then there is the question of what message it sends to the next woman who finds herself in the same position; if it is okay to drop your unwanted child off at the hospital like an overdue DVD, how much worse is it to cut the trip in half and just go to the woods?

Being a ferocious supporter of abortion rights, it pains me to draw a link between the lawful and legitimate termination of a pregnancy and what any and all sane people know is murder. But as painful as it is, any sane person should be able to see at least some link. While in the years since the political changes Hungary's demographic statistics have tended to move towards those of other western countries, in the area of abortion it seems to be moving away. While most such countries have seen a modest drop in abortion rates since 1990, Hungary has actually recorded an increase. In fact, in the two decades leading up to the millennium, the rate increased by more than 20%. According to global statistics website www.nationmaster.com, Hungary now has the third highest rate of abortions among the top 100 countries tracked, measured as a percentage of the overall population. For every 1,000 Hungarians, there are 7.66 abortions, compared to 4.17 per 1000 Americans and just 2.19 per 1000 Canadians.

The problem is, for every 1,000 Hungarians now, there may only be 650 in 50 years' time. In the first three months of this year, only 30,290 babies were born in Hungary, 361 less than in the same period last year, and the lowest number since the dark days of WWII.

Which brings us back to where we started, with csecsemőgyilkosság and "looming demographic crisis." Next week we will look in detail at this slow-motion calamity, which could virtually wipe out this thousand-year old nation within a century. Now that you know what is at stake, I trust I won't have to again resort to drastic literary measures in order to keep your attention.

- to be continued.