Adopting a baby in five days
“If you ever had to adopt a baby then whom would you settle for?” This was the question that I posed to myself recently. Not that I had to nor wanted to adopt a child. I have two of my own (biological ones, so my wife tells me), and they are more than a handful. It all started in Karachi one fine morning while I was working in the ER. A young couple had brought a two day old baby girl to me. The ER triage slip simply stated “baby adopted” as the reason for coming to the ER. I had never come across that as a presenting complaint in the ER, so my curiosity was piqued, irrespective of it being early moments of my ER shift without adequate caffeine in the system. It turned out that the baby had been picked up half an hour before, from a major orphanage in Karachi. The baby had been delivered the day before, per the orphanage staff’s speculation, and she had then been left at the doorstep of the orphanage. Although babies being abandoned there might have been a normal occurre...