Tracking New Born Babies !

Last weeks discovery of two abandoned new born babies has turned the spotlight on the procedures in place in New South Wales for recording all births - and little has changed for centuries.  The birthing units in all the state's hospitals have an obligation to report a birth to the Registrar of Birth's, Death's and Marriages within seven days.  The parents are legally obliged to also report a birth and have sixty days to carry out that duty.

The advance of computer technology is seeing the installation of a system called "Lifelink "which will automatically connect both hospital and parent notifications of birth, but this will not become operational until next year.  In the past, little concern seems to have been associated with details of a new baby missing from the official records.  Nobody was tasked with knocking on the door and making enquiries.   It was presumed that all births were happy events and no followup was necessary.

An Inter Agency Task Force is being formed to try and close the loopholes.   The Department of Justice, the NSW Health, Family and Commmunity Services, and the Ombudsmans office will combine to formalise the procedures to ensure that the details of all births are recorded.

This is indeed a worthy intent, but the problem with the bureaucracy is that once a review committee is formed it has a tendency to take on a life of it's own.  It can quickly accumulate staff to carry out it's tasks - and morph into a new entity.  The witticism  " Bigger than Ben Hur and with a cast of thousands " is not entirely unknown.

The last thing this state needs is an increase in the bureaucracy in these fiscally difficult times, and it seems unlikely that any form of government agency will be successful in recording the birth of babies that their mothers are determined to keep secret.  They will certainly be able to tie together the loose ends of any births in a hospital birthing unit, but out there in the depths of our multicultural society there are customs and religious requirements that differ greatly from the expectations of our ordinary citizenry.

It is not unusual for a woman to successfully hide a pregnancy until full term and for that birth to proceed unaided.   In many cases, an infant is brought up by a family member or an associate from that same ethnic group to hide the identity of the real mother, and in such cases recording the birth officially creates obvious difficulties.  In many cases, a teenage girl finding herself pregnant in a heavily religious family faces impossible decisions.

There is a danger that this new review committee may make things worse - and actually increase the danger.  Should it decide to require any doctor becoming aware of a pregnancy to alert the registry this would encourage pregnancies in difficult social circumstances to avoid all forms of prenatal care. It also drives another wedge into the secrecy that surrounds those in this country without legal documentation.  Not only do they need to avoid any form of identification check but seeking medical help when pregnant may see them locked away in a detention centre.

The baby abandoned in a storm water drain at Quakers Hill and the one buried in the sand at Maroubra beach are probably the tip of an iceberg.  The long running Tegan Lane case back in 2006 should have been the wakeup call, but providing a safe way for a mother to legally dispose of an unwanted infant is much more likely to be successful than implementing a draconian system for tracking down each and every pregnancy in this state.

With such a delicate issue, the "softly softly " approach of gentle encouragement  is much more likely to bring results that a heavy handed legalistic regime !