Purpose:

To prevent young children going into care, reduce abortion rate, family breakdown and isolation of women, provide social support to women.

Target group:

• Women, especially young, lacking support and under pressure put by the family and/or community, which may make them have an abortion or abandon ‘the unwanted' baby into institutional care;
  

The Mother and Baby project was focused on the youngest entrants into the current system of institutional care.

It aimed to demonstrate that social work intervention at a crisis point in life of vulnerable pregnant women can produce better outcomes for both them and their children.

A team of three social workers were working with the staff and directors of the two main baby homes in Lviv city to identify mothers at risk of abandoning children and to reunite babies who have been placed in care with their mothers, where it was safe to do so.

The project was implemented with Lviv oblast Department of Family and Youth and Lviv oblast Department of Health Care.