How to preserve the bond between mothers and newborns
Women who plan to abandon their newborns are encouraged to keep them
“I would like to meet a pregnant girl without housing, employment, or support, but with problems.” This kind of ad will soon appear at bus stops and on public transport throughout Kyiv oblast, which is launching a three-year program called Preventing Baby Abandonment. Created by the charitable organization To Each Child, one of the project’s goals is to distribute leaflets in Kyiv and other cities and villages in the region. The leaflets provide phone numbers to social services and target women who want to abandon their children.
According to the Ministry for Families, Youth and Sport, 600 newborns are orphaned in Ukraine’s maternity homes every year. Ukraine has one of the highest rates in Europe of children residing in boarding schools. In most cases, mothers abandon their babies because of lack of housing, money, or family support. When they become pregnant, they don’t know where to go for help.
The main objective of the program is to help mothers find a way out of their desperate situation and encourage them not to abandon their offspring.
A CHANCE TO CHANGE LIFE FOR THE BETTER
Outdoor advertising is only the first stage of the program Preventing Baby Abandonment, which has a budget of one million hryvnias. We will soon be seeing new social advertising boards in the cities of Kyiv oblast, appealing to mothers not to abandon their babies in maternity homes or orphanages. Later, there will be video clips on this subject broadcast on TV. For the time being, the program is limited to Kyiv and Kyiv oblast, but the organizers are planning to reach the national level over time.
Pilot projects have been introduced in some cities of Kyiv oblast, and the results are already obvious. According to Liudmyla Nikolaienko, director of the Kyiv Oblast Social Services Center for Families, Children, and Youth, a few weeks after the start of the project they were approached by several mothers who wanted to abandon their child in a baby shelter. They found out about the social centers from the leaflets. Experts claim that most women are unaware of the existence of social services.
“Women who want to abandon their children can change their minds on one condition – if they feel they have support and believe that their problems can be solved. We also try to persuade them that the best way to protect a child is to preserve the biological family rather than to leave them at a refuge,” Nikolaienko explained.
“Most of the women who came to us had housing problems. So we asked the regional social services to find a place for them to live, like a room in a hostel, or to track down their relatives, who could offer them accommodations. Another option is to find a sponsor who can help provide new housing, but this seldom happens.”
In the last few years baby abandonment has declined. Whereas in 2005 the Kyiv Oblast Social Services Center for Families, Children, and Youth recorded 119 cases of newborn abandonment, there were 35 cases in 2007 and only 12 in 2008. Nikolaienko says that this noticeable reduction is a result of the work done by early intervention services that emerged two years ago and by consultation services at maternity homes. They helped prevent 142 cases of baby abandonment.
TWO YEARS TO REEDUCATE A MOTHER
If a social service fails to find housing for mothers or to help them forge a relationship with their relatives, it sends them to Mother and Child oblast centers (there are seven in Ukraine). Women go there when they say they want to abandon their child.
“The women and their newborns stay at the centers for up to 24 months,” Nikolaienko said, “but their main objective is to prevent abandonment. The women see psychologists and social educators, who reeducate the mothers and prepare them for life together with their babies.”
The case of Svitlana, a resident of the Mother and Child center in Fastiv (Kyiv oblast), illustrates how the life of a mother and her child can change after a stint in this kind of institution. Now the 29-year-old mother is bringing up her daughter Vlada, who will soon be 16 months. Svitlana ended up at the center because she had no home.
“When I learned that I was pregnant, I did not think even for a minute about abandoning the baby,” Svitlana recalled. “But I had no place to go after the birth of Vlada. I come from Yahotyn district. There were five of us in the family. My family eked out an existence. My parents often abused alcohol, and when I was four, my mother died of an alcohol-related illness. I lived with my husband in his house for the last seven years. When he found out about my pregnancy, he refused to recognize the baby as his and insisted on an abortion. But I was 28, and I knew that if I terminated the pregnancy, I would lose the chance to be a mother. So we divorced over this, but I couldn’t go back home, because my family house was in very bad shape. So I moved to Kyiv and worked at a confectionery factory until the last day of my pregnancy.”
After her child was born, Svitlana lived for another two months in Kyiv and then returned to Yahotyn. She spent a few more weeks at the local hospital. Then social services suggested that she stay at the Fastiv center until they could find her some housing. Svitlana would like to find a job after leaving the center and send her daughter to a kindergarten. Life seems to be improving, and the only thing that bothers Svitlana is her relationship with her family.
“We phone each other from time to time; usually my sisters and I talk. But there is no question of getting any real help,” Svitlana continued. “As for Vlada’s father, he doesn’t even remember us. He has a new family, a wife and a little boy, who is two months younger than Vlada. But staying at the center improved my character, and I realized that people can and must ask for help. All they have to do is knock on the door – it is sure to open.”
In the two years of its existence the Mother and Child center in Fastiv has provided shelter to 35 women, most of whom chose to continue living with their children. According to the center director Larysa Borui, these results were achieved thanks to the cooperation of psychologists, social educators, and the mothers themselves. Once here, the women have an opportunity to radically change their lives. This is especially true of underage mothers, who are taught how to keep house, look after their children, and get some education. Experts, however, are convinced that such centers should be the last resort.
TIME TO CHANGE STEREOTYPES
The cooperation between social centers and doctors is another important step toward spotting potential child abandoners. Now all maternity homes in Kyiv have separate rooms for such mothers. They are given psychological consultations and then are reported to social services. In the past two years, the Kyiv Oblast Center has supervised 2,000 women. Only 35 of them came to the Fastiv center.
“This shows the importance of social services in the provinces,” said Volodymyr Kuzminsky, the director of a branch of To Each Child. “Kyiv oblast has set up services for early prevention, family support, and family monitoring. Their task is to support a family and prevent it from breaking up, and to prevent a child from ending up in a boarding school. If this still happens, the child should be placed into a family-type orphanage. So our goal is to stop mothers from abandoning their babies, not to expand the network of Mother and Child centers.”
Another goal of the program is to shatter the stereotype about children in boarding schools. As Kuzminsky explained, many Ukrainians take a dim view of low-income or large families, so they ask the authorities to take children away from their parents and send them to children’s homes.
“Living in an orphanage has a disastrous effect on children. It ruins a child’s psyche and causes permanent damage, especially to children under three years,” Kuzminsky continued. “At the age of three, a child’s brain is only 75-percent formed, so most relations with the outside world are instilled in the child’s consciousness in the first years of life, which must be spent with the mother.”
According to the Ministry of Health, there were about 4,000 inmates in children’s homes as of late 2007, 51 percent of them between the ages of one and three. They suffer from anemia (18 percent), delayed physical development (32 percent), psychological disorders (63 percent), and rickets of the 2nd and 3rd degree (3.8 percent). It would be wrong to say that a child’s separation from its mother is the main cause of these diseases, but lack of maternal affection leads, one way or another, to grave somatic dysfunctions in children.
If children are returned to their families, they stand a chance of developing their physical and mental qualities normally. So it is necessary to develop innovative patterns for working with families in order to prevent the abandonment of newborns. But no less important is the shaping of public attitudes. Our society must change its attitude to orphanages and should not decide where it is better for a child to live – in a family or a children’s home.
Experts are also convinced that the new program will help debunk the myth that most baby abandoners are drug addicts or alcoholics. Such cases do happen, but social workers claim that most such mothers are former inmates of orphanage. They are unable to build family relationships, find employment, or use their own judgment. So the main goal is to persuade all women that the child is not a problem. It is a chance to acquire a new vision of life and to grow – together with the child.
