Leaving your newly born flesh and blood to die of exposure is psychopathic. It is a staggering disregard for human life. It is murder, unambiguously. People who do this are prosecuted for murder, and they (probably, hopefully) always will.
Same goes for miscarriages and for spontaneous infant death, which are also prosecuted as murder, even when the mothers had nothing to do with the death of their kids, and actually did wanted to become mothers, using a broken legal system as a moral base to define what is wrong is pointless
https://www.pregnancyjusticeus.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Pregnancy-as-a-Crime.pdf
This is different than leaving your child at the doorstep of an orphanage or a designated "safe haven" area, or wherever else a child is expected to be taken care of when their parent doesn't want them. The fact that these exist is part of the reason why leaving your born child to die of exposure is psychopathic: there's no normal circumstance where you would have to do that.
Not all countries have safe heaven laws, which is the case of Japan, in which child abandonment regardless of whether the baby survives or not is also prosecuted by law, with a punishment of 5 years in prison, so the act of leaving a child at an orphanage is already a crime, unless the mother formally interns the child, which defeats the whole process of not wanting the child, because it requires of the mother to first acknowledge the child as her's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_hatch
In fact the fact that Japan only recently is adopting this mechanism has slowly, very slowly reduced the rate of abandoned babies, but only in the Kumamoto prefecture were the system is being implemented, for the rest of the country there's no options
But added to that not every city has an orphanage
Not every woman knows about them or whether their own city has them, or the legalities of interacting with one
Nor even considers such thing as an option specially if from the very start they don't acknowledge their pregnancy, and the options that don't exist are not made in order to facilitate the adoption of the child, but to punish the woman who doesn't wants nor can't raise the child, as just so happens to be the case for Japan, because being too poor to raise a kid is also punishable by law
Additionally, we prosecute for this as child neglect and murder when it happens at any point of time after their birth-- but the act doesn't somehow become more like child neglect and murder the older they get. It just is fatal child neglect.
We prosecute before the child is born too, just the act of ending pregnant can already put a woman at risk of becoming a criminal, even if they want to have the kid, as explained on the document linked above in this comment
We're not talking about abortion-- we're talking about leaving born children to die of exposure, in a world where nobody is forcing you to do that.
Yes we are, because birth control is one of the main solutions to avoid unwanted pregnancies and the horrible situations of newborns getting killed
In a world that stigmatizes abortions, criminalizes them, doesn't offers support nor educates young women on how to handle a pregnancy, nor protects them against abuse, and doesn't offers infrastructure at neither physical nor the social levels for a newborn to be adopted in the cases in which an unwanted pregnancy is carried to term
And that on top of all that, also criminalizes and judges women for not raising the children they give birth to regardless of how they ended pregnant, child murder is pretty much a forced option for women that never wanted to have one
Women are being forced to be murderers, child abandonment is not something that happens on a whim, and the phenomenon can't be simplified and chugged to some convenient mental anomaly, it is a product of an unfair society that refuses to face the problems of the people who end having to give birth against their will
Denying such reality and acting like everything is fine and that there's no base problem leading to this tragedies is plainly irresponsible, if you actually do care, then start up with actually understand why these things happen, and what needs to actually be done in order to stop them from continuing
Instead of creating a fantasy about psychopaths that would prefer putting themselves at risk of death from birth complications, by going into labor in a public toilet, instead of getting themselves admitted into a comfortable hospital and opting to put their child into an orphanage
Among all the known cases of child murder due to abandonment, not even one single woman, ever testified to them wanting for things to turn they way they did
Whether you ever wanted to take care of a child doesn't have anything to do with your responsibility to not kill your already born children. If it did, we wouldn't ever prosecute child neglect.
It does when as just so happens to be the Japanese case, there's only 2 actual options being offered, you raise the kid yourself, or you don't
The idea that every woman who ends with an unwanted pregnancy has free access to medical care, to freely decide whether or not they want to give birth, and then transition towards putting the unwanted child into an orphanage when the pregnancy advanced to a point in which it would be too risky to terminate, is a fucking delusion that ignores the reality of the world we live in