Mother-and-Child Reunion

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Infant T, Infant M and Infant D occupy identical cribs in a small, drab ward on the second floor of Washington's District of Columbia General Hospital. A Fisher-Price mobile dangles above each bed. No one ever visits them. They have never been outdoors.

The babies were born in October, November and December. They have long since outgrown the maternity ward. They are healthy. In fact, there is no reason why any of them should not be home now -- no reason except that they have no homes. Their mothers left in a hurry weeks ago, providing only phony addresses and phone numbers before slipping back to cocaine habits and homelessness. Among the other things they neglected to leave behind for their children were names.

Abandoned babies were far less painful to contemplate before the crack and AIDS epidemics, back when they came swaddled in baskets with heartbreaking notes, in the thousands rather than in the tens of thousands. Now they are a shared social nightmare, the blame for which may depend on the political philosophy of the beholder. Conservatives might find it hard to imagine a purer shirking of personal responsibility than the mother who throws her child, at birth, upon the charity of the state; liberals may decry the forces that drive poor, addicted and HIV-positive women into this most wrenching and demeaning admission of failure.

Last November the Department of Health and Human Services, in its first such tally, reported that 22,000 "boarder babies" were deserted in 851 hospitals in 1991. Three-quarters of the infants tested positive for drugs at birth. They had no relatives, only nurses; no world beyond the ward. Some stayed in the hospitals so long they learned to walk there. Most were doomed to an early entry into America's brutal foster-care system, and in the meantime each baby's maintenance cost up to $1,500 a day.

But since 1991, at D.C. General and other institutions around the country, another story is emerging. The three infants with their mobiles, pitiful as they are, represent a sharp decrease from two years ago, when the daily census of abandoned babies ran as high as 25. "We used to have them in four or five rooms," says D.C. General's communications director, Linda Ivey, proudly. "Now there's only one nursery." New York City's Harlem Hospital Center reports that its daily count has plunged from 20 to three. At Grady Memorial in Atlanta, the annual total of boarder children fell from 52 in 1990 to 22 last year. The improvements reflect a courageous willingness to identify -- and tackle -- root causes. All three hospitals practice early intervention, targeting problem mothers during pregnancy. Each addresses not only motherhood but also the addictions and other tribulations that can make motherhood seem unendurable.

Grady Memorial's Project Prevent, funded by a $450,000 federal grant, is perhaps the most aggressive program, cooperating with Atlanta's police and homeless shelters to recruit pregnant drug abusers. Each woman receives personal attention from project adviser-advocates. The program also pays for transportation and other child-care costs until the birth. Chicago's Haymarket House even houses its clients during pregnancy and provides follow-up services for as long as three years. Says director Wanda Thomaston of her clients: "It's often their first sober pregnancy. They've never felt their babies move or experienced labor pains."