Cafe Seoul 2016 04 21 414 The Baby Box

Cafe Seoul: Expat Life in Korea

Finally! The fabled, long awaited Baby Box episode! I'm sure you listeners out there have had enough of the discussions about which superhero films are good and which aren't, or who's a cool expat doing cool stuff, so this episode is a bit of a serious one. Perhaps you found your way here as you were linked from somewhere else to either defend or argue against the baby box. If so, welcome. This writeup will get to the baby box soon enough.
News of the Weird
Korean Girls Try American Pizza
Korea Herald says Japanese are boycotting McDonalds
Netizen Asks in Naver Cafe if it would be okay to Adopt Children to get Housing Benefits, then Relinquish the Children
Ask Rob and Eugene
Why do both Rob and Eugene care about adoptee issues if neither of us are adoptees?
On the Pulse w/Rob
And this is where the show gets a bit on the heavy side. We were put in touch with Ross Oke who is a human rights activist to discuss the baby box. Admittedly, going into the conversation, all three of us are very much against the baby box and view it as a violation of human rights of children who are being abandoned in these boxes. The discussion is great and Ross expertly answered all of our questions and then some, but there is so much more information that exists out there and I encourage you all to do your own research and develop your own conclusions. Here are some sources for your perusal. There did use to be a lot more readily available hard statistics on the matter but the website they are contained on is not currently available, but in short, a common defense of the baby box is that it prevents infanticide, which statistically is not the case. In fact, infanticides slightly increased once the baby box arrived on the scene in Korea, showing that there is little to no correlation between baby boxes and infanticides (as a causal relationship would show infanticides on the decrease once the box appeared, but the statistics show otherwise.)
Special thanks in this episode:
Jane Trenka