LETTER FROM CASABLANCA
The dragnet is as unusual as it is worrying. Arrested at the end of January, in Fez (Morocco), doctors, nurses, administrative staff and security agents are suspected of having sold newborns to families wishing to adopt. The defendants face several charges, including human trafficking and corruption. A first hearing before the judge, on March 19, provided a glimpse of the scale of the trafficking: in the dock, no less than thirty-four people, some of whom operated from three public hospitals in the city.
Although it is described as” extraordinary “ Given its size, the existence of such a network does not surprise those involved in caring for abandoned children. Already in 2010, a previous affair, in Casablanca, hit the headlines. At work this time, a retired midwife who claimed an average of 3,000 euros per newborn. Thanks to the complicity of officials, infants were even registered in the civil registry.
As in Casablanca, single mothers were allegedly complicit in the trafficking discovered in Fez, which once again sheds light on the “two faces of the same problem”, suggests socioanthropologist Chakib Guessous. On the one hand, pregnant single mothers, faced with the opprobrium of their families, while sexual relations outside marriage are punishable by prison and abortion is prohibited. On the other, babies abandoned because they are unwanted or whose care proves complicated in the absence of an unknown father or one who refuses to recognize his child.
Erratic support
Difficult, however, to quantify the exact number of abandonments. If the presidency of the public prosecutor put the number of legally abandoned children at 1,649 in 2018, Unicef estimated in 2008 that there were four times as many. In 2011, a shock wave was caused by the publication of a study by the National Institute of Solidarity with Women in Distress (Insaf): it identified more than 210,000 single mothers between 2003 and 2009.
In Casablanca, the “wild abandonments” newborns occur in the middle of the street or in front of the door of a mosque. On average, more than 300 people are found in the metropolis each year, dead or alive, according to Insaf. “But we know nothing about those who are taken by unknown persons and who are not reported to the courts”, observes its president, Meriem Othmani, who denounces the risks of exploitation weighing on these children. The others start their life in a center managed by an association or in a social protection establishment (EPS) under the State.
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