From the Didn’t Know That Department comes a disturbing tale of how unwanted babies are dealt with in Germany. TheEye confesses to complete ignorace up until today of the existence of Baby Hatches – where newborns can be disposed of in much the same physical way as you’d put rubbish down the shute in a block of flats.

There are some 80 Babyklappen across Germany meant to provide parents with a safe and legal way to surrender newborn infants to state care. The concept, which dates back to medieval Catholic churches, was instituted in Germany in 1999 to help prevent infanticide. But on Thursday the German Ethics Council said that the hatches, which parents have used to give up some 500 babies so far, were morally “problematic” and should be closed because the most at-risk women fail to use them and they deny children the right to know their origins.

“The German Ethics Council suggests that pregnant women and mothers in emergency situations be aided as much as possible without damaging the rights of others – their children in particular,” a statement said. The organisation called for a “renewed dialogue” about how to improve prenatal social services for women.

On Friday, the Catholic Women’s Welfare Service, which oversees 19 baby hatches, said the call for change deserved recognition. “We simply can’t continue this way,” the organisation’s leader Maria Elisabeth Thoma told daily Frankfurter Rundschau, adding that the legal concerns of the Ethics Council were convincing. She encouraged the German government to find a way to insure legal certainty for the mothers and children in such situations.

Despite baby hatches throughout Germany, gruesome cases of infanticide and child abandonment still continue to make national headlines. The most notorious case involved a woman jailed for 15 years in 2006 for the manslaughter of eight babies.

Sabine Hilschenz, a divorced, unemployed and alcoholic dental assistant from a depressed area of eastern Germany, hid the corpses in buckets, flowerpots and an old fish tank at her parents’ home.

In October, the remains of four babies were found in a Berlin apartment following the suicide of their alleged mother. Later the same month a man’s dog found a dead infant along Munich’s Isar River bank.

TheEye, who has only known that this system exists because of the Ethics Council report that was published this week, doesn’t like the process, the reasoning, the morality or really anything about this whole scenario. But, harsh and clinical though it is, does this depressing rubbish-chute approach save lives? TheEye is genuinely in a moral quandary on this one.