I’m not reading much of the New York Post as I used to. The Post is a Rupert Murdoch rag and it features regular editorials by such heavy thinkers as Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly. The paper’s hard-news articles are either of the lock-’em-up-throw-away-the-key-true-crime variety of story or heavily-slanted-to-the-right national and international news. Throw in a dash of celebrity gossip (Page 6, Liz Smith and Cindy Adams), some sports news and media reviews, and there’s your 25-cent daily tabloid.
Nearly everyday I’d read through it, fascinated by all the crime stories and police-blotter news squibs. You realize: man, NYC is a violent city (well in some neighborhoods). You quickly come to the conclusion you should end your club going/bar hopping early. The shooting and fighting start about 4 AM, when the bars start closing.
That’s the stranger-on-stranger violence. The domestic-variety mayhem can happen anytime and there’s plenty of that too. Then there are the frequent stories of young women dumping their newborn babies. In dumpsters and other places. Some babies are found in time and are saved, some are not.
A woman would have to be really desperate to throw or give away the newborn that she had carried to term, but, in America, when a baby is discovered abandoned, even if it’s still alive, first thing is it becomes a police matter; great effort is expended to track and capture the mother, whereupon she is charged, tried and, if convicted, imprisoned. Our punitive way of looking at things.
In some places they do it differently though. I came upon the following story listening to BBC. I had no idea that the “foundling wheel” has been in existence for centuries. The concept is good: all emphasis is on the newborn and its survival. Check it out:
Dec. 15, 2006 — Italy has revived the medieval practice of establishing special depositories where parents can safely and anonymously abandon their unwanted newborn babies.
From the as far back as the 8th century, it was common for desperate mothers to lay an unwanted child on a wooden wheel, which was half inside the wall of a convent and half outside. This allowed mothers to leave their babies without been seen.
Today’s version of the so-called “foundling wheel,” follows the same concept, but has been updated. The new foundling wheel offers a heated cradle area and is located half inside the Casilino hospital in Rome.
In the old models, parents rang a bell once they had placed their baby in the wheel and turned it so the baby was wheeled inside. The new wheel is wired to automatically signal hospital employees when a baby has arrived.
Raffaela Milano, the Rome councilor for social affairs, said reviving the old tradition is an attempt to offer desperate mothers a “further option.”
“Under the Italian law any woman has the right to give birth anonymously in all hospitals. We created this wheel for those women who are not aware of this opportunity,” Milano said.
Located in a poor district with a high concentration of immigrants, the Casilino hospital has recorded the highest number of abandoned babies in Rome.
In the past three years, 26 babies were abandoned at birth in the hospital.
The first foundling wheel began functioning in Marseille, France in 1188. A decade later, Pope Innocent III, shocked by the number of dead babies found in the Tiber, founded Italy’s first revolving crib at the Hospital of Santo Spirito, on the Tiber embankment near the Vatican.The wheel concept spread, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries, and as late as the 19th century thousands of wheels were installed and thousands of babies were recovered across Europe.
[Photo by kind permission of http://www.babyklappe.info/ Walter Winckelmann - Metallarbeiten, Hamburg]
No comments:
Post a Comment