Another grisly chapter in the War on Children

Mother hid dead babies in the freezer
BY SIMON FREEMAN, TIMES ONLINE June 03, 2005

Graz, 120 miles south of Vienna, birthplace of “Arnie”Schwartzenegger is realing from the sordid tale of the discovery of four dead, newborn babies.

Their mother, a woman aged 32, is woman is believed to have given birth to them over the course of the past three years. She is said to have confessed to the killings saying that she wanted to hide her pregnancies from her boyfriend. "I hope God can forgive me," she told investigators.

The woman's long-term partner, a carpenter aged 38 who has three children from another marriage, told Police that he had never noticed that she was pregnant.

Graz is the regional capital of the province of Styria which has had a program in place since 2001 allowing women who don't want to keep their babies to give birth anonymously. In June 2001, a baby hatch was installed at the LKH-Regional & University Hospital, Graz at the initiative of the Government of Styria, the charity Caritas (Roman Catholic Diocese of Graz-Seckau) and the Styrian Hospitals Authority.

This allows mothers who can see no alternative to give up their baby anonymously and without being observed (at a Babyklappe - see photo) at a place where it will be safe and properly cared for.Legislators use only one supporting argument: avoiding the risk of infanticide.

France, Luxembourg and Germany (through use of the Babyklappe)allowing such anonymous births. 42 US States have enacted "save haven" laws which permit a person -- usually a parent -- to abandon a newborn baby, at a specified location (texas 1st state to do so in 1999). Sweden has the "Allmänna barnhuset" which follows a royal decree in 1771 to prevent mothers of unwanted illegitimate children being sentenced to death. Despite objections that it steals the Right of the Child the knowledge of their parenthood there are more demands for the process - a major topic of debate in the Czech republic for the last 7 years.

"A Common Thread" is a French Film (shown London from 20th May) that won the Critics' Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004 explores the topic through headstrong Claire who learns that she is five months pregnant at the age of 17, she decides to give birth anonymously.

The Legislative Decree on the Protection of Births was enacted by the collaborationist Vichy government in 1941 and has been said to be a result of the consequences of collaborators seeking to conceal the parentage of children by the occupying forces. Today the today the procedure for anonymous childbirth is set out in Social Action and Families Code (Art. 222-6) It is said 2 children a day are born under these "X" provisions but recently moves have been made to reduce the practice.

In spite of the passing of a law in 2002 creating a National Council for the Access to Personal Origins, the traditional line of ‘respect for life’ arguments for the maintenance of accouchement sous X has prevailed in France. Surprisingly, this line is supported by the feminist ‘pro-choice’ movement, and converges with a line of arguments that criticizes the supposed ‘biogenetization’ of society, and advocates a definition of the parent–child relation as a ‘purely social construction’.

Once identity erasure became institutionalized, it became normalized giving the new government the same benefits that it gave the Vichy government: The X laws maintained bourgeois standards of family honor, paternity and sexuality. The X laws obscured criminal and abusive sexual relationships. The X Laws relegated and continue to relegate the victims and their offspring, not to mention just plain inconvenient children, as official state secrets.

The European Court of Human Rights in 2003 upheld the French law, ruling that denying children given up at birth the right to discover their biological parents' identity did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and that such children were not victims of undue discrimination.

"I'm deeply, deeply upset," said Pascale Odievre, who was given up for adoption at birth in 1965. She brought the case after trying for more than 13 years to discover her mother's name through the French courts.