The following excerpted article comes to us from The Inclusion Daily Express. The full article can be found in The Miami Herald. The intersection between severe poverty and the devaluation of people with disabilities is one of the world’s oldest stories. We are tired of the old stories. So tired.
S.K.
In Haiti, Abandonment Of Disabled Babies A Growing Problem
(Miami Herald)
August 12, 2009
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — [Excerpt] Her frail body lies almost motionless inside a rusted metal crib. Her diaper is soiled, but she doesn’t cry. At 9 months old, she weighs just five pounds.
The staff inside the Abandoned Baby Unit at the government-run Hospital of the State University of Haiti call her Sarafina. She was dumped on the hospital’s front steps: No name, no note.
But doctors know her story all too well — like the dozens of other special needs babies crammed inside the unit, she was tossed out by parents who could not deal with her mental retardation.
“We find them on the streets, in the hospitals, in sewers,” Dr. Questly Bonne-Anne said amid the wails of bedridden, diaper-clad children confined two and three to small cribs. “We guess their age, we give them their names.”
Entire article:
In Haiti, abandonment of disabled babies a growing problem
http://www.miamiherald.com/582/story/1178073.html
Planet of the Blind 
Thank you for printing this heartbreaking column. People need to know about abuse of children wherever it occurs and in whatever form.
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