Baby hatch
place where people can bring babies and abandon them anonymously in a safe place to be found and cared for
A baby hatch or baby box is a place where people (typically mothers) can leave babies, usually newborn, anonymously in a safe place to be found and cared for. This was common from the Middle Ages to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the device was known as a foundling wheel. Foundling wheels were abandoned in the late 19th century, but a modern form, the baby hatch, was reintroduced from 1952 and since 2000 has been adopted in many countries, most notably in Pakistan where there are more than 300. They can also be found in Germany (100), the United States (150), Czech Republic (88), Poland (67), Belgium (1) and Japan (2).
The hatches are usually in hospitals, social centres, or churches, and consist of a door or flap in an outside wall which opens onto a heated or insulated soft bed. Sensors in modern beds issue an alert when a baby has been placed in it. In Germany, babies are looked after for eight weeks during which the parent can return and claim the child without any legal repercussions. If this does not happen, the child is considered available for adoption.
History
Baby hatches have existed in one form or another for centuries. The system was quite common in medieval times.
“Baby hatch” enters the record as place where people can bring babies and abandon them anonymously in a safe place to be found and cared for. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Baby, hatch and place can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q745455. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1952 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Baby hatch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.