Baby Dump Pimps Remain Bold; Brag About Hospital Dumps

The grandmother said her daughter, described as “mentally ill,” had received no options counseling and implied that the baby had been surrendered while the mother was under the influence of medications after delivery. According to them, the mother, though she had been considering adoption, had no intention of dumping the baby into the “safe haven” black hole. She had, in fact, never heard of the program and claimed a social worker assured her the baby was being placed in a “Christian adoption program.” Still unsure of what she wanted to do, Mom went to court and regained custody. A few weeks later she placed the baby in an open adoption with parents of her choosing. Doctors Hospital refuses comment, and a hospital official was reprimanded for speaking to the Dispatch’s Price and letting the hospital be identified in the newspaper—something hospital officials claimed breached “safe haven” anonymity. My blog on this case is here. The young woman’s mother posted their story on AVVO, here.

Since “safe haven” files are sealed we really don’t know much about individual cases or the spectrum of “safe haven” practices outside of what the press tells us or we can gather from public records or private sources; for instance, blogs of persons who have surrendered or adopted a “safe havened” child; or personal interviews with those involved in a case. (At a later date I’ll discuss the ICAN reports out of LA County, the only “studies” that give us any “detailed” case narratives in the US).) For today I will limit myself to a few general remarks taken from what information we do have on how baby dumping operates.

“Safe haven” is being used to exploit vulnerable women, some unsure of their parenting interests or skills, and/or unaware and kept unaware, of options such as state and private financial and material aid, temporary foster care in which parental rights are not endangered, or traditional adoption plans. I believe some women have used the laws to hide babies from family members, particularly babies’ fathers. There are anecdotal reports from men claiming that pregnant girlfriends have threatened to use the “safe haven option” if the fathers don’t back-off on objecting to adoption plans. Some women, of course, are duped, as in the case of the Grove City, Ohio woman. Poverty certainly plays a hand in “safe haven” surrenders.

Especially vulnerable are women (and some men) who appear to be illegal immigrants with no support network, little money, and afraid to seek prenatal and postnatal care, social service counseling, and financial aid for fear of being arrested and deported. They tend to have low or no English language skills. If actually interested in making an adoption plan they are unaware of how to do it. One such case happened in 2005 in South Carolina, a case, complicated by the “surrender” meddling of the local God Squad “crisis pregnancy center” ready to claim another one for Christ. Here is what I wrote about it at the time:

The latest exhortation comes out of Rock Hill, South Carolina, where a young Hispanic woman, perhaps an illegal worker afraid of the cops, Homeland Security, and deportation, clearly isolated from her community and social service assistance,and ignorant of US adoption law, stood outside the Piedmont Medical Center waiting for a couple who looked Hispanic willing to take her baby. Providentially, according the Rock Hill Herald (article no online, but in my possession) the couple she eventually approached had only the previous day read a safe haven poster on the door the York County Crisis Pregnancy Center, andgoooollllly gee, Andy, they knew just what do to. They bundled up mother and baby, called the center, and were shortly escorted into PMC by a friendly Crisis Center volunteer.

According to Trudy Laud, director of YCCPC, a CareNet ministry franchise, the mother was calm but kept her head down and was teary-eyed. “She was scared and really didn’t want to do this, except she felt she didn’t have a choice.” Not content to leave it alone, our baybeesaver felt the need to preach to the press, “The law provided life for this child. Rather than having an abortion or throwing her baby in a Dumpster, she did everything she could for her baby.“

Along with my commentary:

Wait a minute, Trudy! You just said that she clearly didn’t want to give up her baby. She was crying. Now you’re saying she would have played dumpster toss with it if not for the good services of your agency? Do you think before you talk? Get a grip! Did you actually present positive, family affirming “choices” to her? If you’d really had the best interests of mother and child in mind you would have advised her of avenues of help her keep her child or how to approach her family and friends, or how she could place it in temporary care until she could logically think out her plans, or how to make an ethical adoption plan where nobody is hiding behind locked doors. What about the father? Instead, you betrayed the mother with your phony good concern and initiated this little one into the Great Anonymous Brother and Sisterhood of the Safe Haven.

But, full of prim certainty, Miss Trudy washes clean any thought that her “counseling” was amiss. “It’s a God thing. He has plans for that child.”

Funny how God always agrees with his obsessive mind readers.

INSTITUTIONALIZED BECOMES NORMALIZED

As Ron Morgan correctly wrote in his comparison of the 1941accouchement Sous X (Born Under X) French law, instituted by the Vichy government during World War 2 to permit anonymous birth to hide the misdeeds of Nazi occupiers (and is still in effectsans Nazis) , and US baby dump statutes, “once the social welfare practice became institutionalized, it became normalized.” In other words, legalized dumping would become just another entree in the government’s child welfare hash house (l: baby dump box at Pomona Valley Hospital where “distraught parents” can leave a baby without personal contact with hospital staff–a violation of California law.) (Morgan’s essay is no longer on line; hard copy in my possession.)

Safe haven” laws were marketed to legislators and the public as something that would be used rarely. Though statistics on discarded infants in the US have been inexplicably lacking, a Lexus-Nexus study of news stories commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services in 1998 indicated that in 1992 65 infants were found abandoned (57 alive and 8 dead) and in 1997 105 newborns were found abandoned (72 alive with 33 dead). While these numbers are no doubt low, there is no reason to believe that the 1990s and beyond collected a critical mass of neonaticides to warrant the moral panic that has fueled baby dump propagandists, makes every parent a potential felon and every baby’s life in danger. A 2005 survey of county cororners in California found that the number of newborns dying from discard and neglect since that state’s law was passed in 2001 remained at 13-15 per year (report no longer online; hard copy in my possession.)

Yet The National Safe Haven Alliance, until recently on its website. boasted that upwards to 3000 babies had been reeled in to their program that was supposed to be used rarely. Does NSHA and other promoters really expect us to believe that the number of parents with murderous intent has increased that much in the 23 years since the HHS survey was taken? Does NSHA really expect us to believe that 3000 parents were stopped from throttling their infants at birth by the good offices of baby dump evangelism? Maybe that’s the reasons their stats have disappeared. They don’t.

BOARDER BABIES

The National Abandoned Infants Assistance Resource Center at Berkely,defines boarder babies as babies under the age of 12 months left behind at hospitals after their time of medical discharge. Their parents may have been drug or alchohol addicted; the babies may have been likewise born addicted or with HIV, disabilities; or simply unwanted Parents were rarely charged with abandonment.

In 2004 New Jersey, especially the Newark area, was overwhelmed with boarder babies–and their cost and care. In February of that year, Human Services Director James Davy announced that $300,000 had been allocated to fund studies to determine what kind of programs could be developed to stop hospital abandonment and to place the newborns, upon release whenever possible, with relatives. (Newsday, February 3, 2004; no longer online but hard copy in my possession; cut and paste copy here.). The New York Times, however, reported that in January 2004 Davy had also added $100,000 to New Jersey’s $500,00 “safe haven” promotion budget to convince parents to leave their newborns at hospitals! Don’t “boarder your baby; “safe haven” it.

The scam is clear. By changing the definition of newborn abandonment cases from the negative “boarder baby” hospital abandonment to the positive “safe haven” hospital abandonment, boarder babies began to disappear from the language of child abandonment. Abandoning parents, once considered social pariahs and deadbeats became courageous life givers applauded for not following their natural instincts of reckless abandonment and murder.

New Jersey’s A1406, the so-called Adoptees Birthright Bill, which would unseal the original birth certificates of some of the state’s adult adoptees, includes a section sealing by default, all the original birth certificates of the state’s “safe havened,” even babies born to identified parents and/or never adopted. New Jersey, in fact, is the only state to codify sealed records for Class Baby Dumped. Although that seal was written into the state’s baby dump law earlier, “adoptee rights advocates” there decided to shut up and put up and abandon the ultimate sealed records poster child to float perpetually in a black hole; thus making them abandoned twice, once by their parents under the friendly auspices of law and again by their so-called advocates who dont’ think they count.