Odds & Ends: Adoption & Dobbs Scholarship Update, West Virginia, Texas

Catching up on a few odds & ends– not big enough for separate blogs, but information we need to get out.

Adoption & Culture Update: We have been informed by the Journal of Adoption & Culture that more articles are coming in for the new issue dedicated to Dobbs and adoption. This is important work from scholars in various fields: law, literature, journalism, history, philosophy, the social sciences, art, creative writing, and psychology, PB and I are trying to catch up with them, but it will take a while. Such good stuff!! Contributors include Alice Diver, Gretchen Sisson, Michele Merritt, Mary Cardaras, Sandra Patton-Imani, Sally Haslanger, Peggy Phelen, and Laura Briggs. Emily Hipchen is the editor. New articles are arriving and being posted daily, so keep checking.

West Virginia: Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc announced on Facebook that a box will arrive there early next year. We have found no confirmation of this, and have no idea where it will land. A baby box bill was filed there in 2020 but never received a hearing. West Virginia, however, is a Home Rule State, and boxers there might be using that mechanism to move boxes in without legislation. We will keep you informed.

Gatesville, Texas: The Gatesville Messenger, on November 23, ran a long PSA, disguised as a news article, on the Texas Baby Moses (Safe Haven) law. It mentioned baby boxes, but didn’t promote them, perhaps because Texas has no boxes. We expect a bill to be introduced next session. The article included the following sentence; can anyone tell us what it means?

Safe Haven laws have saved 4,505 newborns and counting. Of those, at least 1,604 were illegally abandoned.

The 4.505 might have come from the National Safe Haven Alliance as the number of SH cases reported to them (The number on the SHBB website, however, is 4,87 currently), but how can 1,604 of 4,405 be”saved” from illegal abandonment by SH laws since those abandonments were illegal? And what is the timeline and the source for any of this? MEOW!!!!! I’m confused! Does SSHBBN need to hire a professional statistician?

That’s all for tonight. We are still plugging away at National Adoption (Awareness) Month, and believe me, it’s not easy! I plan to make some fixes on the SSHBB page tomorrow. Unfortunately, that doesn’t count as a blog.

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Image of Angelika the Personal Assistant Cat with the words Angelika says "I'm confused" on the left in white letters.

I’m sorry, but I’m still confused. I need to get a job where hoomans make sense. Alas! once copy-edited a book on an advanced introduction to semiotics and deconstruction that made more sense than Safe Haven Baby Boxes. But Foucault keeps my spirits up: ” A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based… To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.” In love and solidarity, Angelika, the Personal Assistant Cat