Talk:Child abandonment

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 16 August 2018 and 7 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Abosby.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 18:56, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Smikofsky, Nsjohnson28, Kcb222. Peer reviewers: Carolineschulz, Dimvasilk, Maddiemcadams.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:24, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

[Untitled]
I think we need to make a distinction here with the increasingly-common practice of societal encouragement of new mothers to "abandon" their infants at hospitals, firehouses, etc., instead of throwing them into dumpsters and trash cans. -- Zoe

Agreed. nooooooooooooooo removing bizarre sentence in this context ( "It is hoped she will be able and willing to resume taking care of him.")


 * Is it bizarre because she should obviously not be allowed to do so, or because you can not imagine that she would change her mind, or because the prison term has obviously taught her to be able and willing again? - Patrick 17:22 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not so sure that this sentence is correct: "Today, abandonment of a child is considered to be a serious crime in many jurisdictions, because the result is that the child and the other parent, if any, often end up on welfare. " COuldn't this be considered mala in se? I'm going to edit it as such. Vedek Wren 18:59, 2 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Um, you clearly need to get informed about the complex U.S. child support enforcement system, which is specifically and expressly driven by the need to prevent absent parents from offloading their parental responsibilities onto the government. The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement has a handbook online that sort of explains the system. .  Also try searching Google for AFDC and TANF.  The major objective of turning AFDC into TANF in 1996 was to reduce the overall welfare caseload, and as part of that, Congress mandated that the states improve interstate child support enforcement. If the custodial spouse and children go on welfare as a result of nonpayment of child support, the custodial spouse is required to assign her right to child support to the government.  Then the government goes after the noncustodial spouse to make that person pay for the cost of supporting their kids and ex-spouse on welfare.  Every state today has a "Child Support Enforcement" or "Child Support Recovery" office which chases after child support deadbeats.  See, for example, the Utah Office of Recovery Services.  The FBI also investigates the worst cases under the federal Child Support Recovery Act of 1992.  --Coolcaesar 18:03, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I almost forgot to mention the most burdensome part of the 1996 law. All employers in the United States are required to report all new hires to their state's new hire reporting system so that their Social Security numbers can be checked against national lists of deadbeat parents.  Search Google for "new hire reporting" and you'll see how every state has a New Hire Reporting site that specifically references child support enforcement.  --Coolcaesar 18:09, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't see the point of just about anything Coolcaesar has just said. While it is an interesting look into abandonment/child support issues in the U.S. the whole world is not the United States. I don't feel that having such an intense focus on just one country is in any way beneficial to the article. EttaLove (talk) 21:55, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

child abandoment is very commen all around the world. i think that we should do something about it. if you know that you wont be able to soport a child then don't have one..

the following do not work together:


 * 1) almost every 18 seconds a child loses their parents
 * 2) this means that there are about 470,052 new orphans each day and 1,734,480 each year

there are only 86400 seconds in a day. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.209.155.167 (talk) 15:43, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

abandament
If the legal guardian leave a child at the other guardians for over a week without any contact what can the other guardian do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.57.108.39 (talk) 20:53, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Common arguments against and for child abandonment
I removed this section for two reasons. One, it is unsourced. This does not alone warrant removal, but it does raise the question as to whether or not it provides any value to the article. Two, it doesn't make a lot of sense. The argument against child abandonment is that children should be raised in families rather than a foster care system. The argument for it is that there'd be no birth-based social distinctions. Both assume that it is possible to either force all people to never abandon a child or force all people to always abandon a child. Neither is possible so I don't know why it would even be suggested. Since the statements are unsourced, impossible, of questionable application (and logic alone forces one to wonder who seriously considers abandoning all children to a foster system and who seriously thinks a problem can be solved simply by restating the problem), I feel there's no reason to retain the section. If more realistic and moderate arguments for and against the practice (such as whether or not child abandonment should or should not be considered a crime and to what extent) and these arguments can be sourced, it should return. - 67.187.245.98 (talk) 18:23, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Moses
If giving examples of historical abandonment to avoid being killed, Moses would be up there, wouldn't he? Mulp (talk) 22:52, 30 September 2011 (UTC)

Child Abandonment in Fiction
Would this be better off split into it's own article? Right now it's taking up the bulk of the article, and that doesn't seem right. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.212.135.81 (talk) 03:28, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Merger proposal
I propose that the article Baby dumping be merged into this article, as the subject and possible causes are already covered here, much of the material being duplicated. Baby dumping would be left as a redirect to this article. Arjayay (talk) 08:01, 15 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Agree. Good arguments!  Lova Falk     talk   17:04, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Lead sentence is misleading/wrong
Currently the lead sentence says


 * Child abandonment is the practice of relinquishing interests and claims over one's offspring with the intent of never again resuming or reasserting them.

This statement includes, but surely does not intend to include, giving a child up for adoption legally. What we need here is an accurate definition that is sourced, possibly paraphrased from a law in some jurisdiction but in a way that keeps it valid in other jurisdictions too. Meanwhile, I'm going to insert "in an extralegal way" into the lead sentence. Duoduoduo (talk) 15:57, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

False and misleading quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt
"Almost all children without parental care in the United States were in orphanages or foster arrangements until President Theodore Roosevelt declared the nuclear family was best able to serve as primary caretaker for the abandoned and orphaned"

Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919, long before the term nuclear family was in use. This quote needs to be removed from the article. It is factually wrong. Harold Darling (talk) 21:28, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

New Subsection: Child Abandonment Policy
I have a proposal for a new subsection of the article that I think would add value to the page. The subsection would discuss the policy aspect of child abandonment. First, it would delve into the various aspects of child abandonment laws in the U.S., such as what technically constitutes child abandonment and how the law varies state to state and globally. Next, the subsection would include how certain domestic and international policies affect rates of child abandonment nationwide. For example, how China's One Child Policy affected rates of child abandonment in China over the past few decades. Another example is how American involvement in the Vietnam War resulted in the abandonment of thousands of Vietnamese-American babies by Vietnamese mothers that were unable to care for children in the war-torn country. Lastly, in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu's Decree 770, limiting rights to contraception and abortion in the late 1960s for the sake of developing a robust Romanian population, resulted in tens of thousands of babies being abandoned in maternity wards across the country. Nsjohnson28 (talk) 20:50, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Sources on Child Abandonment Policy
Nsjohnson28 (talk) 21:04, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Lack of statistics
For and anyone else interested: At the time of reading, the biggest issue I could identify with this page was the essentially complete lack of statistics for child abandonment. WHO and UNICEF, probably the biggest and most related organisations, don't seem to actually report on child abandonment in their statistics reports, and my impression from these sources and a few other papers is that abandonment lies on a sliding scale of child neglect, and abandonment is difficult to measure since it relies on an assumption of intent as well as behavior; secret child abandonment is apparently difficult to distinguish because the perpetrator might not be a mother: "Routine surveillance systems have a poor record to capture homicides due to omission of care or deliberate neglect. Abrahams et al, for example, found in their South African study that a number of mothers abandoned their babies with the intention that they would die or with the hope that they would be found alive. As the motive behind this kind of abandonment is often not known, official statistics often do not capture them as homicides" "Additionally, although the assumption is often made that it is the mother who leaves her infant at a baby hatch, there is increasing evidence that this is not necessarily true. It is frequently men or relatives who leave infants at baby hatches, which begs the question of what has happened to the mothers and have they consented to abandoning their children." The same author has seemed to publish a paper, but I can't access it: [1]

The best information I could find about this was in this paper, a review over 10 countries including the US and the UK, but it has very limited statistics: Originally, our ambition was to collect data that would enable us to compare the extent of child abandonment across the 10 countries, but this was not possible. Official statistics on the number of abandoned children do not exist in most countries. Mostly, we had to rely on studies based on media searches (cases reported in the media), but the results of these studies were not comparable across countries because of methodological differences. For Russia there is one source I have that points to 2%... it's possible it is recorded as part of the government there, I'm not really sure if that source is reliable enough anyway. 

Based on this, I think I will mention a lack of data on the topic for these reasons as cited, and I'm surprised there is no mention distinguishing "secret child abandonment" versus "open" or "public" child abandonment, so I might add mention of that too.

[1] Browne, Kevin, Shihning Chou, and Kate Whitfield. "Child abandonment and its prevention in Europe." (2012). Darcyisverycute (talk) 23:42, 17 June 2022 (UTC)