Havana Cuba. – In just over a month, three babies have been abandoned: two of them in Havana and a third in Las Tunas. All three were perfectly formed when they were found, but two were already dead. The causes are not known, nor are they born dead or murdered. Only of the little girl found in the neighborhood of Mayorquín (Artemisa), wrapped in a bloody cloth and with the umbilical cord still in place, some information has been released. Only she was lucky enough to survive thanks to the timely action of the people who rescued her, and the medical staff of the “Iván Portuondo” Hospital.
Of the two dead boys, absolutely no detail has come to light. In social networks they talked about arrest of the alleged mother of the baby found in the town of Mulgoba (Boyeros municipality)but the authorities have not confirmed the arrest, nor the relationship.
Faced with these abandonments that occurred in such a short period of time, the response of the public has been condemnation, concern and fear that they will become frequent. The three cases speak, first of all, of the low human condition of the parents of these babies, but they also raise many questions: Were they delivered outside hospitals? Was there control over those pregnant women who so easily abandoned their newborns in garbage dumps? Were these dropouts the result of unwanted pregnancies that could not be terminated in time? Would either of the mothers be a lonely and desperate minor?
The collapse of the health system caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has left polyclinics and hospitals without the minimum of resources to carry out the simplest procedures. If before it was relatively easy to have a menstrual regulation or an abortion, since the arrival of the coronavirus it is not.
The shortages in health centers and pharmacies even extended to condoms, a problem that was denounced on social networks not only because of the impossibility of maintaining safe sexual relations, but also because of the impact it would have on the spread of venereal diseases and the Family planning.
Those who directly or indirectly participated in the abandonment of babies should pay with jail for such an atrocity. However, it would be necessary to question to what extent the crisis that plagues the country, extended to the health system with consequences that are yet to be known in all its magnitude, caused the commission of such serious and insensitive acts.
In the same way, it would be necessary to analyze what possibilities the parents of unwanted children have to formally hand them over to the State without making them the object of ridicule and persecution. Cuba has been sunk for decades in a process of social and human degradation that has produced several horrifying episodes, from the murder of the 26 mental patients in the Havana psychiatric hospital in 2010, to the lucrative business that the sale of state-of-the-art antibiotics, admission beds and oxygen balloons during the pandemic.
But abandoning babies, two of them dead, supposes another level of cruelty that should not be approached from the usual secrecy by official authorities.
OPINION ARTICLE
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