‘Baby dumping’ laws punish women while men walk free

In Namibia’s courts, cases commonly referred to as “baby dumping”, begin at the end.

A child is found. The police are called. A woman is arrested. The law moves quickly after that. Charges are laid – murder, culpable homicide, and concealment of birth – depending on whether the child lived or died.

What comes before that moment rarely carries the same weight.

Police data shows that more than 230 babies were dumped in Namibia between 2016 and 2022.

The statistics are not only shocking but also heartbreaking: 41 in 2016–2017, 22 in both 2017–2018 and 2018–2019, before rising again to 41 in 2019–2020. The figure peaked at 56 in 2020, then dipped to 32 in 2021. Twenty cases were reported in the first five months of 2022.

Gaps in understanding

Since then, no updated national figures have been released by law enforcement or government agencies, leaving a gap in understanding the current scale of the problem.

What has continued, however, is the steady stream of individual cases reported across the country and repeated warnings from officials that baby dumping remains a persistent issue.

In the absence of updated statistics, the pattern is measured less in numbers and more in recurrence.

A problem that has not disappeared but simply continues without a consolidated national account.

These are not isolated cases. They form a pattern that has repeated itself over many years, across communities, and under similar circumstances.

The justice system is designed to respond to harm, and in these cases, the harm is undeniable. But the structure of that response raises a question: how much of the story is actually being heard?

Seek help

Speaking this week during an information-sharing session in Windhoek, gender equality minister Emma Kantema pointed to the conditions that often underpin these cases, urging women in distress to seek help rather than resort to desperate measures.

She said many women find themselves in abusive relationships or live in abject poverty, circumstances that leave them isolated to the point where decisions are made out of pure terror and desperation.

Counselling and support, she said, could help prevent those outcomes.

Her remarks speak to what the courtroom often does not fully engage with.

In most criminal cases, motive is central. Courts examine intent, background and circumstance before arriving at a judgment.

In infant abandonment cases, the focus tends to narrow quickly to the act itself – the child, the location, the outcome.

Research into these cases shows a consistent pattern. Fear of stigma. Lack of financial support. Denial of pregnancy. And often, abandonment by partners. Many of the women involved are young and navigating these pressures alone.

That context does not remove responsibility. But it does complicate it.

Shared parental responsibility

Yet in practice, the legal process seldom grapples with that complexity.

The overwhelming majority of those charged in these cases are women.

The law recognises shared parental responsibility, but in court, accountability is almost always assigned to a single individual – the mother.

This creates an imbalance that sits uneasily within the justice process.

A pregnancy involves two people, but when it collapses into crisis, only one appears before a magistrate.

By its nature, the system intervenes too late. By the time a case is prosecuted, the chain of events that led there has already unfolded.

What remains is the final, desperate act – and that is what the law is meant to address.

The question is whether that is sufficient.

Because if the conditions that lead to these cases remain unchanged – the lack of support, the absence of partners, the silence around crisis pregnancies – then the cycle is likely to continue.

Kantema’s call for women to seek help points to a different approach, one that prioritises intervention before the law is triggered.

But that raises another question: is that help accessible, visible and trusted enough to be used when it is most needed?

By the time the law steps in, the opportunity to prevent the act has already passed.

In 2019, government, through the gender equality ministry, decriminalised baby abandonment, allowing mothers to leave unwanted newborns at designated safe places without risk of prosecution.

More needed

At the time, the ministry’s Joyce Nakuta told the media that babies could be left at hospitals, police stations and registered places of safety.

Reacting to the decriminalisation in 2019, gender research and advocacy project coordinator at the Legal Assistance Centre, Dianne Hubbard, said: “Like all social problems, baby dumping needs a set of responses. No one is suggesting that one type of response on its own is the answer.”

But Sister Namibia media officer Elsarien Katiti warned at the time: “Our fear is that we are taking every possible deviation to address the real issue of the censorship of female reproductive rights, especially that of contraceptive autonomy."