Ezio Greggio’s appeal to Enea’s mother and Luca Trapanese’s response
«Leaving a child in the hospital is not abandoning, it is making a love choice: it means handing over a life into the hands of someone who will be able to love it and give it the opportunity to find happiness. Enea can’t know it yet, but her mother probably saved him. For this I feel like saying THANK YOU to Enea’s mother!». So Trapani.
«A gesture full of altruism and generosity»
In the same tone, L’Association Ai.Bi. Children’s friends which fights child abandonment by promoting foster care and adoptions. The «gesture of a woman who she chose for the sake of her sonif from a personal point of view he asks for a proper silence, from a political and social point of view he renews the need for a law to promote cradles for life and childbirth in anonymity”.
On the one hand, in fact, one must read the «definitely very difficult decision» as an act «full of great altruism and generosity». Because it means deciding to bring a child into the world that you feel you won’t be able to support. Therefore choosing not to have an abortion but to carry a pregnancy to term, “opening the way for a ‘normal’ life, like that of every child who is born”.
Why does a mother abandon a child?
And of course we ignore what they are the reasons that led to the woman’s choice, who also kept Aeneas in her belly throughout her pregnancy, carrying its physical and emotional weight. If they are causes of type economic, psychological or social, or all three. Of course, while the news also spreads the story of a mother from Varese in prison for aggravated abuse of her 16-month-old daughter (she sprayed deodorants on her which caused the child serious abrasions), it is at least worth comparing and weighing . And who can’t help but judge someone anyway, can at least straighten the shot: which of the two women is more “mother”? The one he abandons and saves or the one he raises anyway, even in conditions not suitable for a child for the most varied reasons?
Not just Aeneas. There are too few cradles for life in Italy
On the other hand, the case of Aeneas raises a question that concerns society, namely the possibility of giving birth anonymously, without acknowledging a child. While we tend to believe the child’s right to trace their origins prevails. In fact, the law provides for two possibilities, the Cradles for Life (here the search engine to find the closest one) and Childbirth anonymously in hospital.
But, Ai.Bi. denounces, «in Italy, the Cradles for Life are only about sixty, and distributed unevenly throughout the area».
In the regions of Basilicata, Molise, Sardinia and Friuli Venezia Giulia, there isn’t even one, and even in those regions where there are more, such as Lombardy, where there is also the one opened by Ai.Bi. – Amici dei Bambini in San Giuliano Milanese (in the hamlet of Pedriano, in via dei Pioppi 4), not all of the territory is covered.
The proposal of Ai.Bi. A cradle for life in every municipality
For this reason, Ai.Bi. has been working on one for some time bill to make the establishment of a Cradle for Life compulsory in every municipality: about 6,000 euros are enough to prepare one and, therefore, the costs would not be a big problem.
Modern and technologically advanced version of the medieval Exposed Wheelthe cradle for Life is a structure specially designed to allow mothers in difficulty to leave newborns totally protected, in full respect of the child’s safety and the privacy of those who deposit it. Positioned in an easily accessible and out of the way place of the hospital, it is equipped with a series of devices (heating, safety closing of the door, 24-hour control unit and network with the medical emergency service) for the complete protection of the child.
Anonymous hospital birth: a little-known alternative
The first alternative for the mother who wants to give birth to her child no obligation to register identity should though Andbut be the plimb in the hospital in anonymity, which offers maximum health and legal protection. The law allows it (Presidential Decree 396/2000, art. 30, paragraph 2). In this case, the mother’s name remains forever secret and in the birth certificate of the child it is written “born of a woman who does not consent to be named”. The immediate reporting to the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Juvenile Court of the situation of abandonment of the unrecognized newborn, allows the opening of an adoptability procedure and the identification, in a very short time, of a suitable couple.
According to law 149 of 2001, the adopted person can have access to the identity of the biological parents only if it was recognized at birth, not when anonymous birth was requested.
In Italy, children not recognized at birth, second the estimates of the Italian Society of Neonatology, are 300 every year. In 2021 there were 1072 declarations of adoptability of minors, of these in 173 cases the identity of the parents was not known.
Ninna hoa project to protect abandoned children promoted by Francesca Rava Foundation NPH Italia Onluspromoted a survey on the phenomenon a few years ago, with questionnaires that also probed the causes that lead mothers not to recognize their children. In first place we find the mental and social discomfort (37.5%), followed by the fear of losing your job or more generally by economic problems (19.6%). The fear of being expelled or having to Raise a child on your own in a foreign country it is a trigger for 12.5% of immigrant women; follows the coercion for 7.1%; there young age (5.4%); loneliness (5.4%) and the violence (1.8%)
Aeneas, from Mangiagalli to adoption
Enea is the third child entrusted to the Mangiagalli Clinic’s Cradle for Life, which has been active since 2007 in a room outside the hospital. The adoptability procedure has already been opened for him. Before proceeding, you have to wait ten days, which is the legal deadline for the recognition of the parents. Then, within a month, the most suitable family will be selected to raise him. Naturally, chosen from how many have already completed the process of becoming adoptive parents, with all the documentation and psycho-social investigations necessary to complete the request. A process, as you know, very long, tiring and… for a few.
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