Each year, women make the desperate decision to abandon their babies. Specially designed ‘baby windows’ can help – but some argue they make matters worse
When Romina discovered she was pregnant in 2021, she was 39 years old and homeless, without a euro to her name. She did what many a lonely and frightened woman has done throughout history, on learning that she was going to have a baby, and pretended she wasn’t. “If you don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist – something like that,” she told me, more than three years on.
By the time she noticed the changes in her body, she had been homeless for nearly seven years. Before that, she had lived a comfortable, secure life in The Hague, with a man she had fallen passionately in love with. But the man had become controlling, she said, preventing her from working or seeing her friends, spying on her and eventually threatening her if she left him.
