Saving lives: Babies lost and found

From Jan to Sept 2013, around 125 infants were found in Karachi, 49 in Lahore and 22 in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

KARACHI:

As he picked up the lifeless body of a newborn baby girl from a garbage dump in Saddar, Muhammed Mursaleen had cried. That was a decade ago, and the baby was partly eaten by animals.

Since then, Mursaleen has picked more than 100 babies, both alive and dead from dumpsters in various parts of the city. It is still difficult for him to come to terms with the sight.

Thirty-five-year-old Mursaleen has been working for the Chhipa Welfare Association for the past ten years. “When I joined Chhipa, these cases were rare but now they are a common occurrence,” he said.

On November 9, 2013, the body of a newborn baby girl was found inside Essa Nagri graveyard in PIB Colony. The same day another body of a baby girl was found from a garbage dump near Numaish Chowrangi.



“Most of the babies are wrapped in a towel or duppata. For the first time when I went to collect a baby from a dumpster in New Karachi, I remember she was raising her little hands. I wish I could have adopted her,” says another volunteer, 30-year-old Farrukh Jalil, who is working with Chhipa and has picked eight newborn babies till now, out of which seven were alive.

An eminent social worker and the man behind Chhipa Welfare Association, Ramzan Chhipa, is of the opinion that the increase in the frequency of such cases is because of poverty. “People who already have two or three daughters don’t want to have more,” he said. “In the past few months, we have picked alive girls too. Some people also leave them in our cradles, which means people are aware that we have taken up this cause that we don’t want people to kill their children but to leave them in cradles or inform us to pick them up.”

But Riaz Ahmed, an advocate of the high court, disagreed with Chhipa. He believes that these children in most cases are born out of wedlock. “It is a crime to kill newborn babies and people can be prosecuted under Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code,” Ahmed told The Express Tribune. Unfortunately, these crimes are committed during darkness and if we don’t have witnesses, the case cannot be registered,” said Ahmed.

According to Chhipa, people who abandon babies immediately call their organisation on phone and inform them about the whereabouts of the baby. The quicker the volunteers reach the baby, the better the baby’s chances of survival. He added that if they give information to the police about people who dump their babies, they would stop informing organisations about the baby. “It is murder. People should realise that every child brings his destined share of food with him/her, so we shouldn’t kill them because of economic constraints or insecurity,” he added.

In Chhipa’s experience, there is a shift in the reasons for these children being abandoned. He feels that around a decade ago one could say most of the babies were illegitimate but keeping in view the current financial conditions and poverty, it’s apparent that it’s happening more commonly because of poverty and ignorance.

An important point Chhipa made was about the link between ignorance about and an unmet need of family planning methods and their use, and the abandonment of newborn babies. An unwanted baby whose parents did not practice timely contraception finds itself much too often on a garbage dumpster.

Between January and September 2013, around 125 infants were found in different parts of Karachi, while 49 were found in Lahore and 22 in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

According to the spokesman of the Edhi, Anwar Kazmi, 99% of these abandoned infants are female, and it probably happens because of poverty as girls are considered an economic burden.

Kazmi said that the Edhi Foundation had 36,000 applications for adoption but they don’t find enough babies alive. Chhipa has some 10,000 applications.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 18^th, 2013.