Abandoned Babies: Examination of Abandoned Babies’ News in Turkey

The aim of this study was to examine stories of abandoned babies’ news published in newspapers in Turkey. In this retrospective descriptive study, infant deaths and abuse stories in newspapers published as Turkish examined. In the 80 news published between 01.01.2013 and 31.12.2014, 88 babies reported. Twenty eight (31.82%) of these babies were abandoned. Of abandoned babies, 25 had died, 23 were newborn, and most of them were abandoned by unmarried mothers (n = 12) and unknown persons (n = 14) for death. This finding revealed that abandoned babies were an important baby’s health problem. The protection and development of children’s life and health might be contributed by preventing unwanted pregnancies, determining to women who having high risk in the matter of the abandonment of baby, and counselling these women so that they can abandon their infants safely. the news source of these was Turkey and related to the 0-12 month old baby. Data were collected with a data extraction tool developed to record the information in the news about the baby. Data were evaluated by the number and percent. Eighty news stories were found relating to 0-12 month old infant’s deaths and abuse in Turkey, 88 babies were mentioned in these stories. Twenty eight (31.82%, n = 28/88) of these babies were reported to have been abandoned, and tragically, 25 of these abandoned babies had died as a result. Some features of abandoned babies were given in Table 1. Twenty three babies were newborn, gender of 14 unknown, and most of them were abandoned by unmarried mothers (n = 12) and unknown persons (n = 14) for death. All of babies were found in where was not suitable for life of babies, such as wasteland, garbage container, dump, garbage bags, leave alone in home, the roof and of the house, apartment gap. Also, survivor three babies were found in cemetery, garbage container and wasteland where was not suitable for survival of babies. These cases occurred in 21 province of Turkey. A study based on media reports in England between 1998 and 2005 found that 16 abandoned babies had been reported [8]. Meanwhile, a study in Denmark spanning the years 1997-2008 found 12 cases of abandoned babies; it was thought that only five of these babies could have been alive when they were abandoned and it was reported that this situation was more common among women who were young, unmarried, primipara and who had been in denial about their pregnancies [9]. These findings show that being abandoned presents a serious danger for infants and that health workers should take this into account in order to reduce infant deaths. Context Abandoned babies, with general meaning, are to abandon for the death of baby or to be found by others. Babies are abandoned because they don’t want [1,2]. Abandoned babies, in other words child abuse and neglect, is a serious problem which can be widely seen in all age groups, and has complex causes and tragic consequences with medical, legal, developmental and psychosocial comprehensive [3,4]. There was no find any study made on abandoned babies in Turkey. However, 0.1% of the of late neonatal deaths had been reported to be associated with neglect and abuse in a study examining the causes of infant mortality [5]. Another study based on the reports of Forensic Medicine in Turkey reported that 8% of 328 dead babies in 0-1 years were the abuse and neglect infant mortality cases [6]. This commentary was written to draw attention to an existing situation on abandoned babies in Turkey. We have conducted a study aiming to examine recent stories published in newspapers of infant deaths and abuse [7]. The reasons of the chosen data sources to newspaper reports in this study were more the take please of abandoned babies cases in newspapers, accessible and reliable data source and the data included the whole of the country. In this retrospective descriptive study, conducted in January 2015, ten newspapers which could be accessed via the Internet and had circulations over 100,000 were examined over the two year period from 01.01.2013 to 31.12.2014, published in Turkish. Infant deaths and abuse reported in the numbers of these newspapers were screened using “infant mortality”, “baby and death”, “baby and violence” and “baby of violence” keywords. There were 80 news which Data Number (%) Babies age Newborn (0-28 days) 1-3 months 23 (82.14) 5 (17.86) Gender Girls Boys Unknown 6 (21.43) 8 (28.57) 14 (50.00) Vital status Alive Death 3 (10.71) 25 (89.29) Features of parents Unmarried mothers Unmarried mother and father Divorced mother Unknown 12 (42.86) 1 (3.57) 1 (3.57) 14 (50.00) Table 1: Data on abandoned babies news published in the newspaper (N = 28).