“Born this morning, 5/3/2023, at home. Just her and me, like in these nine months.” It is 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 3, when the alarm sounds connected to the ‘cradle for life’ at the Red Cross committee headquarters in Bergamo. The sound is similar to that of a normal house doorbell. Sometimes it happens that someone opens the crib, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps as a joke. The place was designed to accommodate newborns anonymously.
But this time, the camera connected to the system focuses on a girl. She moves. She doesn’t cry. And while the protocol is activated and everyone is focused on the little girl, that she is well, that she is not cold, the alarm sounds again. In the traffic on Via Broseta, the mother has not moved. No one claims to have noticed her, but she must have stayed there to check that her distress call has been answered, that her little girl has been taken into her arms and brought to safety.
On the second ring to the doorbell, there was a letter in the ‘crib’: “Born this morning, 5/3/2023, at home. Just her and me, like in these nine months,” he read an hour later, excited, the Chairman of the committee, Maurizio Bonomi. “I wish you all the good and happiness in the world. A kiss forever from mom. I entrust you with an important piece of my life that I will certainly never forget.”
A few days after the tragedy of the newborn found dead in a Caritas container in Milan, this story has shocked Italy. The baby abandoned on Wednesday weighs 2.9 kilos and is fine. From her features, she could be of South American origin. “Her vital parameters were perfect, the umbilical cord cut well, maybe she was just hungry because she kept sucking her little hand,” says Antonella Matta, 38, who first cared for her and then chose her name along with an emergency obstetrician from the hospital. Papa Giovanni XXIII, where she was immediately transferred by ambulance.
She decided on Naomi simply because she liked her, “but in Hebrew it means sweetness and joy,” Bonomi notes. The baby was wearing a bodysuit and a pale pink jumper, “she was beautiful, groomed and very well cared for”, adds Matta, who has just returned from another ambulance service, mother of three daughters: “I would not have minded a fourth girl”, smile.
Matta opened the crib. “She was shaking her head a little from side to side, but she was calm,” she explains. “I picked her up and took her inside of her. She cried a bit, but then, in her arms, she calmed down right away.” After her first checks, they bandaged her navel and then, wrapped in a blanket, they transferred her to the hospital, first to the emergency room and then to the neonatology service, where she will undergo further tests.
“At first, I felt disbelief. We often have curious people who open the crib to see what is inside. When we realized that there really was a girl, it was a great emotion, deep, visceral. It was beautiful,” says Antonella Matta.
It is the first time that a mother places her baby in the “cradle for life” in Bergamo, which has been at the Red Cross headquarters for four years, after being transferred from the Matris Domini monastery in Via Locatelli. Managed by the Italian Women’s Medical Association, the cradle has heating and a first-aid kit that can be restored immediately: a sheet, a blanket, a resuscitation kit in case of emergency.
When the window is opened, the alarm and the camera are activated. The mother is guaranteed absolute anonymity, just like in a hospital. At Pope Giovanni XXIII, the average number of babies given up for adoption is two per year. In 2023, there were no cases. The fate of Noemi will be decided by the Juvenile Court of Brescia.
“They called me by phone from the switchboard when I was returning to Bergamo and they were all crying,” says Bonomi, in the Red Cross since 2006 and president since the Bergamo committee has existed (2017): “It was a very strong emotion, just like the message of love that the mother left later, from which the awareness of not being able to give the child a future really emerges. Through the ‘cradle’ we hope to have offered him the opportunity for a better life”.
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