A 22-YEAR-OLD woman from the Netherlands’ ultra-religious bible belt was being cared for in hospital in The Hague last night after the body of her baby, believed to have been born at the weekend, was found in a rubbish skip.
Named only as Melissa, the young woman was being treated in the secure medical unit at Scheveningen prison – where high-profile UN detainees including Ratko Mladic are held – and is expected to be questioned by police today on suspicion of causing the baby’s death.
What has shocked the Netherlands is that the woman is a native of Veenendaal, a quiet town some 70km southeast of Amsterdam – an area where conservative Protestant, so-called “black stocking” churches have about 650,000 members.
Although details of the tragedy are still emerging, it is understood the infant’s body was found by a passerby in a rubbish skip outside the home of Melissa’s boyfriend in the village of Scherpenzeel, which has a population of around 6,000, also in the bible belt.
Her boyfriend, who has not been named, has already been questioned by police and been released without charge. It’s not yet clear whether he was aware of the pregnancy or birth.
Shocked local people say they believe Melissa was confused by her pregnancy, too embarrassed to tell her friends, and attempted – unsuccessfully, it appears – to keep it a secret. “Lots of people thought she was pregnant, but that is not the sort of thing you ask, especially in a village as small as this one,” one man who knows the couple was quoted as saying.
Holland’s bible belt has three main towns – Veenendaal, Ede and Kampen – where the tone of public life tends to be strongly religious. Even strictly regulated Sunday trading, for example, is frowned upon, and it’s not unknown for Sunday shoppers to have their cars stoned.
Many of those who attend the area’s 360 churches were formerly members of the mainstream Dutch Reformed Church. They left it over the years because they believed it had abandoned traditional core values, and went on to form more conservative congregations of their own.
The bible belt forms the support base for Holland’s two Christian democratic parties, the Christian Union and the orthodox Protestant SGP, whose members tend to oppose what they regard as a liberal agenda which includes gay rights, abortion, euthanasia, state-run vaccination programmes and even, in many cases, votes for women.