On Sunday, a dead baby was found buried at Maroubra beach. This comes just 10 days after a baby was found abandoned but alive in a drain in Sydney. These tragedies call for a rethink on how we can better support vulnerable mothers and their children.
Is there an infanticide epidemic?
Infanticide, the act of killing a child under 12 months, is a rare but concerning event. In Australia it is estimated that between seven and 21 infants die this way each year. Abandonment of babies is just as rare.
These cases catch the headlines and cause much concern. Names such as Kathleen Folbigg and Keli Lane are etched in the public mind with much confusion about why a mother would kill her child. The public are still outraged over the baby found in the drain at Quakers Hill two weeks ago.
What would lead someone to kill or abandon a baby?
Child abandonment and infanticide are two very separate acts, yet, in some instances they share a common cause: concealment of the pregnancy. In the case of Keli Lane, her family and her partner testified that they were unaware of her pregnancies. In child abandonment cases it is also common for the family to be unaware of the pregnancy. In these cases, the infant is often left in a busy area, such as a hospital entrance, where the child is found soon after abandonment. It is also common for the mother to seek to retrieve her child after the fact of her pregnancy is revealed.
Unlike child abandonment, infanticide is often linked to severe mental illness of the mother. Such illness can include post-natal depression and psychosis. The mother has a higher risk of experiencing these illnesses if she also is subject to stresses such as poverty, domestic violence or marital conflict. The home environment of the mother is a critical factor in her mental health and the well being of her child. Although most hospitals have excellent psychosocial screening tools to identify mothers at risk at the time of the birth, psychological distress may not occur until she returns home.
What support services are there for mothers who might be at risk?
The two recent high-profile and tragic cases bring to attention the limitations of our support services for vulnerable women. Currently, women giving birth are released from hospital as soon as possible after giving birth. NSW Health acknowledges that most mothers leave hospital within 24 to 48 hours. Many health professionals argue that allowing mothers to go home quickly has many positive benefits and reduces many risks, such as exposure to infections.
The problem lies in the limited home-based support services for vulnerable parents. NSW Health policy is that new parents are “offered” a visit by a child and family health nurse in the weeks following the birth, but mothers trying to conceal their pregnancy may well avoid this “opt in” system.
How can we prevent these things from happening?
Keeping children safer depends on establishing a good support system around the mother. Ideally this should happen during the pregnancy. Services already seeing vulnerable women, such as mental health and domestic violence services, should be well connected to maternal and child health services. We need also to support a more seamless transition for the mother as she returns home.
There would be fewer such deaths if it was Australian health policy that new mothers never leave hospital alone and, if the mother has no support person, that she is accompanied home by a health worker to assist in settling the new family. Health services should visit all new families within 24 to 72 hours after they leave hospital to assess their support needs, as is already the case in some states. Intensive and continued follow-up should then be a matter of policy for all those identified as requiring additional social support.
It’s time for a rethink about how we best reach and support vulnerable families who are most at risk of the tragic outcomes we have witnessed over the past two weeks.
What is wrong with baby hatches? Ridiculous that we don’t have them considering all the chldless parent desperate to adopt. But because of past bad practices there is now an ideological prejudice against adoption. This is disastrous, because there seems no reason why adoption can’t be done well with the right attitudes and supports.
Very glad to see Crikey publishing someone like the president of the Australian Association of Social Workers to write about this topic. I just experienced birth in the public health system with my partner and was quite surprised at how much support is available.
‘The problem lies in the limited home-based support services for vulnerable parents.’
Why doesn’t that statement surprise?
No matter what your thoughts on the inefficiencies or otherwise of governments in providing services, “the market” will never step in to fill this sort of breach. If we want to minimise the social costs – let alone the human misery – associated with tragedies such as these, we have to support programs which aid the vulnerable and build a more inclusive society that provides opportunity for all, not to mention sufficient AND FAIR revenue raising and cost saving measures to fund them. But we choose not to.
Hospitals; schools; emergency services; public transport; child welfare; mental health; a 21st century communications system; training; sustainability; a “grown-up” response to AGW; foreign aid; and the list goes on – we’ve never been richer yet we can’t seem to afford to do anything worthwhile properly right now.
We can, however, afford endless, Orwellian warfare against the “Muslim death cult”; juicy super concessions for the rich; negative gearing; $4.5 bn a year in resource sector subsidies; mortgage-belt welfare for the swinging voters; paying rather than taxing polluters as an AGW mitigation “strategy”; and such ideological fripperies as a quarter bil. a year for school chaplains, no doubt to assure troubled kids they do have a future – just not here.
Not one word about the phantom fathers of these abandoned babies. Not one word about men using condoms during sex and avoiding making their partners pregnant in the first place. Just condemnation of the women and talk of “baby hatches”for goodness sake. It is almost as if they want to breed for adoption. It is the same in all the press reports in all the papers, it is as if they are virgin births.
@Salamander – if you are willing to spend a lot of money maintaining baby hatches at every hospital – no there isn’t anything wrong except that it only addresses the child’s welfare and not the mother’s. Might be cheaper to offer the support as suggested above.
Regarding Adoption, take away all the bad practices of the past and the result is that very few parents will give a child up for adoption. It’s nothing to do with ‘ideological prejudice’.