Baby Safe Havens are an adoption-related hot potato of the scalding and scorching variety.

There are who love the idea and lobby long and hard in favor, while others hate everything about Baby Safe Havens and campaign strongly against.

Heated debate about the so called "Baby Moses" laws covers identity loss, babies in dumpsters, abortion alternatives, and more, and emotions rarely run anything but full and furious around the topic.

What is not usually worried about in discussions of Safe Havens in the US, however, it the physical fate of the child ... adoption is very likely the outcome, as finding homes for babies is not a difficult thing in America.

Not so in Japan, where a fourth child was recently left in a "baby hatch", and where the odds of finding new parents are very slim due to a "cultural aversion to adoption" in the country.

New and controversial, the contraption is located at a Catholic-run hospital in southern Japan and consists of a small door in the outside wall of the hospital that opens to a tiny bed. Upon depositing a child, an alarm goes off to let the staff know that there's a 'new arrival'. (One of the recent four was three-years-old, by the way.)

Rather than being seen as an option for desperate parents in tragic circumstance, many Japanese view the drop-off as an encouragement for parents to "opt out of their responsibilities", with this attitude perpetuated by the fact of a prejudice in the country against adoption.

This comes from the top of Japanese society, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a critic of the "baby hatch" ... seeing it as encouraging for that "parents opting out of their responsibilities" thing ... and his wife, Akie, who reject everything about the idea of adopting.

"There is a feeling that it is somehow natural for children who can't live with their parents to be in an institution," said Masaki Takakura, a journalist and author of a book on adoption.

"This is a hangover from the post-war years, when children whose parents had died were rounded up and sent to orphanages."

In near a reversal of American attitudes, those who adopt in Japan often move immediately afterwards in efforts to hide the fact that their family grew through adoption. Both law and religion contribute to the problem, as Confucianism places great emphasis on biological connections as part of the system on ancestor worship.

Do we need to contemplate the fate of biracial babies, or those with special needs?

Of course, it's not only the adoptive parents dealing with stigma, but a legal apparatus that involves strict registration and the dishonor that comes to an unwed mother that proves a powerful incentive for women to terminate a pregnancy or abandon a child in hopes that no connection will ever be discovered.

When comparing the present-day situation in Japan with the domestic adoption climate in the US, I'm struck by how completely different cultural approaches to something as natural and potentially joyful as making babies both manage to make a mess of it.

For a look at international adoption from Japan, here's the US State Department's page of info. Not an easy process by any means, and with residency requirements, Japan is unfortunately not an option for most hopeful adoptive parents.