Gauteng High Court to Rule on Whether Baby Boxes Violate Children's Act

The Gauteng High Court in Pretoria is scheduled to decide on 7 May 2026 whether "baby saving boxes" are legal. Baby Savers South Africa and Door of Hope Children's Mission are in a legal dispute with the Minister of Social Development over the legality of the boxes. The minister argues that parents who place infants in them are guilty of abandonment under the Children's Act.

The Centre for Child Law, the Centre for Human Rights represented by Lawyers for Human Rights, and the Women's Legal Centre Trust were admitted as amicus curiae in the case. The Centre for Child Law argues that the Children's Act is unconstitutional because it does not provide a safe, no-fault pathway for mothers to relinquish newborns.

About 3,000 infants are unsafely abandoned each year while the baby box system has reportedly saved 580 lives to date.

A mother who cannot keep her child alive does not abandon the child by placing them where someone else can care for them, the Centre for Child Law submitted. "Rather, it is an act of unconditional love; the choice that the child should live and prosper at the mother's cost of never knowing them," the Centre for Child Law stated in its written argument.

The organisation supports the applicants' bid for an order declaring that the Children's Act does not criminalise the safe relinquishment of a child.

The Centre for Child Law states that mothers facing extreme conditions have across centuries and continents placed their infants at the doors of churches, monasteries, hospitals and fire stations. Under the minister's interpretation of the Children's Act, this would also constitute the crime of abandonment.

The Centre for Child Law states that the government has not identified any legal ways in which caregivers can give up their unwanted infants.

"If the lawful pathways the department invoked had existed and been available, those figures would not be what they are," the Centre for Child Law says, referring to the annual unsafe abandonments and lives saved by baby boxes. The Centre for Child Law argues that the Children's Act is inconsistent with the Constitution because it provides no pathway for safe relinquishment where a mother has concluded that she cannot care for her newborn.

It called on the court to declare the Children's Act inconsistent with the Constitution to the extent that it fails to provide a lawful pathway for the safe relinquishment of a child and that Parliament remedy the defect within 24 months.

The Centre for Human Rights says the law must draw a clear distinction between unsafe abandonment and safe placement relinquishment. It argues that where a caregiver takes steps to ensure a child's safety, the law should recognise that act for what it is, not a crime but protecting a life.

Criminalising relinquishment risks that caregivers, fearing arrest and prosecution, may resort to unsafe options putting the infant's lives at risk.

The Women's Legal Centre Trust said that on reading the affidavits filed in the matter, it was glaringly apparent that women and young girls were criminalised while men were let off the hook. Even though the provision in the act does not mention women, its real world-impact is borne almost entirely by them, the organisation submitted.

AllAfrica reported these arguments from the three-day hearing that concluded this week.

The case centres on whether the Children's Act criminalises the use of baby saving boxes or whether such safe placements fall outside the definition of abandonment. The Centre for Child Law cited examples of two single university students forced to go to court after the department blocked their attempts to put their babies up for adoption.

A judge in that matter found the department's conduct evidenced bias against mothers, describing it as "a deliberate stratagem to discriminate and punish" them.