IN a bulletin on July 24, 2026, the National Prosecuting Authority of Zimbabwe (NPAZ) announced that the Kwekwe Magistrates Court had convicted and sentenced a 19-year-old woman to six months’ imprisonment for abandoning her one-month-old daughter along Bahunia Street, Masasa.
The bulletin closes with the hashtags #ProtectChildren and #Reportabuse, stressing that no child should ever face abandonment.
No child should. The question is not whether abandoning an infant is wrong - it is. The question is why a teenager gives birth, flees her family home and leaves her baby on a street at five in the morning and whether a prison cell protects her child, or any child, from that happening again.
The bulletin tells us she had fled home after taking money from her sister.
It does not ask what she was fleeing. It does not mention the man who fathered the child.
It does not tell us whether anyone screened her mental state, or what becomes of a one-month-old whose mother, her source of nourishment and bonding, is now in prison.
The numbers behind the ‘crime’
Baby dumping and infanticide in Zimbabwe follow a documented pattern and the young woman in Kwekwe fits it almost exactly.
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Police recorded 110 infanticide cases in 2021, 75 in 2022, and 13 in the first quarter of 2023 alone, with many more never reaching police records, according to Global Press Journal, 2024. Research on Zimbabwean women convicted of these offences shows they are overwhelmingly young, poor, unsupported and abandoned by the men responsible for the pregnancy. Many reportedly concealed their pregnancies out of fear of family rejection and gave birth alone (Mesu, cited in Global Press Journal, 2024).
The pipeline into that desperation is wide. Zimbabwe’s adolescent birth rate stands at roughly 108 births per 1 000 girls aged 15 to 19, among the highest in the region (Healthy Newborn Network, 2025). And the mental health dimension is not speculative: one in three Zimbabwean mothers screened at six weeks postpartum met diagnostic criteria for depression, with studies consistently finding postnatal depression prevalence of 21 to 33 per cent (Chibanda et al., 2010). A teenager one month after delivery, estranged from her family and alone, sits at the centre of every known risk factor. Punishing her as though she acted from wickedness rather than desperation misreads the evidence.
What the law already understands
Strikingly, Zimbabwean law itself already concedes this point. Section 48 of the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act creates the special crime of infanticide precisely because the legislature recognised that a mother who harms her child within six months of birth may be acting while her mind is disturbed by the effects of childbirth and should not be punished as a murderer. If our statute extends that compassionate logic to a mother who kills, it is incoherent for our prosecutorial practice to extend no such understanding to a mother who abandons a child. Bearing in mind that this is an act from which her baby survived, was treated and was placed in care.
International standards point the same way.
The United Nations Bangkok Rules require States to prefer non-custodial measures for women offenders, particularly mothers of young children, and to take their caretaking responsibilities and mental health into account at sentencing (UN, 2010). Section 81 of our Constitution and Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child make the child’s best interests paramount in every matter concerning her, including, arguably, the sentencing of her mother. It is difficult to see how a one-month-old’s best interests are served by six months’ separation from her mother during the very window in which attachment, breastfeeding and possible reunification are decided.
Notably, Zimbabwe has been moving in the right direction: by 2023, courts were increasingly diverting baby dumping matters away from imprisonment, with no custodial sentences recorded that year and more mothers supported to place children for adoption.
The invisible father and absent safety nets
There is a second silence in the bulletin: the father. A woman cannot make a baby alone, yet case after case, the man who fathered the child faces no arrest, no bulletin, no hashtag. Paternal desertion is a leading driver of infant abandonment, but our criminal justice system prosecutes only the parent left holding the baby. That is not child protection; it is gendered accountability. The safety net has holes of its own. Zimbabwe’s Termination of Pregnancy Act prosecutes abortion and women are the ones who get prosecuted. There is no legal framework for safe relinquishment; no equivalent of safe-haven mechanisms that allow a mother in crisis to surrender a newborn safely, anonymously and without prosecution. Postnatal mental health screening is not routinely available in primary care. Each of these gaps was present on Bahunia Street that morning.
What needs to be done
I am therefore calling for five things.
Prosecutorial guidelines should be established to direct that baby dumping cases involving young, first-time mothers be assessed for diversion, with mandatory pre-sentence social inquiry and postnatal mental health screening.
Sentencing should honour the Bangkok Rules and the constitutional best-interests principle, favouring community-based orders that keep mother and infant within reach of reunification.
There should be equal legal scrutiny of fathers, including rigorous enforcement of maintenance obligations and investigation of desertion in every abandonment case.
Establishment of lawful safe relinquishment mechanism is urgent so that no mother ever faces the choice between a street and a cell.
Investment in adolescent sexual and reproductive health services and community postnatal support, which prevent these cases more reliably than any prosecution, is also critical.
The NPAZ is right: no child should ever be abandoned. But neither should society abandon the young mother behind that child.
