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It looks innocuous enough: a 60cm-long candy-coloured box decorated with a cartoon logo of an infant being gently ferried through the air by storks.
But Japan's new baby hatch has generated controversy since it opened for business last week.
Already under fire from conservative politicians who say it encourages parents to dump infants, the tiny padded incubator - designed for newborns - is the centre of a fresh row since it was revealed that a father squeezed his 3-year-old boy inside.
A spokesman for the Jikei Catholic hospital in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, said the 3-year-old "did not fit the hospital's definition of a baby".
Dubbed the "stork's cradle", the baby hatch is the hospital's solution to rising unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
The incubator is equipped with a monitoring camera and an alarm that goes off when a baby is placed inside. If the anonymous parents don't return within a week, the toddlers are put up for adoption.
The move follows a similar experiment at a rural hospital in the 1990s which was closed when a dead toddler was found inside a baby hatch.
Family-values politicians, including Japan's childless Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have criticised the Kumamoto programme.
But supporters say the hospital is merely responding to the needs of despairing parents who feel they cannot raise their children.
"I'd like to see the baby hatch develop into a window for beleaguered people," said Jikei Hospital President Taiji Hasuda.
- INDEPENDENT
