Hello, I’m Pang Ying. Welcome to Episode 18 of Think Like a Debater.

Around 2014, China intensely debated safe havens for abandoned infants. These facilities protect babies who are left behind.

Because abandonment is criminal, parents often leave infants in remote fields, quiet parks, rubbish stations, or public toilets. By discovery, exposure to heat or cold and long delay may leave them dying. Many abandoned babies are seriously ill, making delay even more dangerous. Safe havens seek to improve survival.

Located outside child-welfare institutions, they contain incubators, delayed alarms, air conditioning, and cribs. Five to ten minutes after receiving a baby, the alarm calls staff to transfer it quickly to a hospital or the institution. The delay lets parents leave without being caught.

The original idea is that once parents have decided to abandon a child, a safe receiving place is better than a wilderness.

Abandonment has profound and complex causes. Addressing it requires prevention, remedies, and response.A safe haven is the final link in social protection: when all other measures fail, it catches every small life and offers shelter.

Why was it needed? At the 2015 Two Sessions, the head of a National Health and Family Planning Commission institute cited an incomplete 2010 estimate of 100,000 abandoned babies per year in China, a major social problem.

China’s first haven opened at the Shijiazhuang Social Welfare Institute on June 1, 2011. The Ministry of Civil Affairs launched national trials in July 2013. By June 2014, thirty-two facilities had received more than 1,400 infants.

The United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries have similar, equally controversial facilities.

Critics see them as disguised tolerance of abandonment.By offering government and society as an alternative caretaker, they may lead parents who otherwise would keep a child to abandon it, creating more orphans.

Shijiazhuang data for 2012 put survival among babies left at the haven at 70%, compared with under 50% before; some sources put the earlier figure at only one-third.