Identity crisis

A law to allow women with crisis pregnancies to give birth anonymously in Germany will be voted on today, reports Derek Scally from Berlin.

Politicians in Berlin's Bundestag face a difficult decision today when they vote on a proposal to allow anonymous births in Germany for the first time.

Government backbenchers supporting the introduction of such a law say it will save lives by giving women with crisis pregnancies a safe place to give birth. It would allow them to deliver their baby in a hospital yet safeguard their privacy, as it would abolish the duty of midwives to register the mother's identity.

But leading politicians and children's groups have attacked the proposal, saying there is no proof that the babies targeted by the law are at risk. They argue the new law would breach the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, guaranteeing children the right to know their parents' identity.

It comes a week after a UN report said that nearly 41 per cent of births go unregistered each year, meaning that 50 million babies born worldwide each year legally do not exist.

In Germany, some 40 to 50 babies are recorded as being abandoned every year, though the true number is believed to be much higher.

"A pregnant woman has to forgo birth assistance if she wants to maintain anonymity," reads the draft law.

"Women in need shouldn't kill their children, they should give them to us," says Maria Geiss-Wittmann, of Bavaria's Project Moses, which backs the law.

With the prospect of anonymous birth, they say the woman could get help from a midwife and receive counselling, increasing the likelihood that she would decide to keep her child.

If passed, the new legislation will legalise Germany's "Babyklappe", hatches in the walls of hospitals where women can give up their new-born babies. Until now they have been illegal, but authorities have chosen to look the other way.

According to the draft law, counselling would "prevent panic acts which are irreversible".

But it is the irreversibility of the anonymous birth law that has drawn attacks from across the political spectrum, as well as from religious and children's groups. A woman has eight weeks to reclaim her baby; after that the child is sent for adoption and there is no way back.

"You entice women with a short-term, attractive solution. But later many women experience tremendous pain. Taking the path of least resistance eventually wreaks its revenge," says Elke Lehnst, founder of the Berlin group Women Without Children.

In France, anonymous births were introduced by the Vichy government in 1941. Since then, more than 400,000 "X-births" have taken place and today an average of 600 children annually have an "X" on their birth certificate instead of their mother's name.

One of those children, Pascale Odievre, is now 37 and taking a case against the French government at the European Court.

"Many people that I know who were 'born under the X' are very unhappy. I myself feel as if I was never born," he told Le Figaro newspaper.

In Berlin, Margot von Renesse, a former family law judge and a Social Democrat MP, is leading the opposition against the proposed law.

She describes it as a "licence to dispose of the care of parents" and favours the existing option of "incognito adoptions".

"Anonymous births are not the way forward," she says. "If a mother makes such a decision out of a crisis, then we have to avert the crisis, not take her child."