Reply #28: It's a side effect of the scarcity of birth control in poor nations.

[Xithras]

This sort of thing used to be common worldwide. If you were dirt poor and got pregnant, it was often easier to give the child away than to watch it suffer or die alongside you. Birth control, abortion, WiC/Food Stamps, and the advent of at-birth adoption services and foster networks have largely eliminated this from the U.S. and Europe, but it's still a daily occurrence throughout much of the rest of the world.

In the U.S., if a woman gets pregnant and has no way to care for it, there are government programs capable of providing minimal assistance, and support networks to find a better home for the child if those won't work...assuming, of course, that she chooses to carry the child to term in the first place. In places like Haiti, there are no such options. If you get pregnant and cant/don't want to be a parent, your only option is to carry the child to term and hand it over to an orphanage. In the U.S., poor women can get subsidized birth control from places like Planned Parenthood to keep themselves from getting pregnant in the first place. In poor nations like Haiti, poverty and social barriers mean that birth control is out of reach of most women, so they take their chances.

Keep in mind that this exact same scenario plays out in the U.S. with American babies every single day. Poor women who get pregnant and cant/dont want to be mothers hand them over to other parents who can and do. The only difference is that we have prenatal adoption networks that let us skip the "uncivilized" orphanage step.