Speaking of babydrop boxes, the long awaited baby box bill, SB 3271, has been dropped in the Illinois Senate. The bill won’t legislate baby boxes or determine specs, but it would basicaly set up a study group to investigate the feasibility of boxes–hygienically referred to as “newborn safety incubators”– in Illinois. It’s attached to a short bill to amend the state’s safe haven law.
From today’s Chicago Sun-Times on Dawn Geras, “safe haven advocate” and founder of Illinois Save Abandoned Babies Foundation: It still happens, and it drives Dawn Geras out of her mind: Infants are abandoned on doorsteps, in alleys, in garbage bags, all places where they may not survive. I don’t know about you, but should somebody so easily driven out of her mind be teaching new mothers how to anonymously abandon their babies with no shame, no blame, no names?
Domestic tranquility continues to elude Bastardette. Did my parents ever have these problems? I think not! But then they were responsible adults. More catch-up today. It’s that time of year again. April 11. Pimp Baby Matthew….er, I mean Save Abandoned Babies Day. For the third year now, the Illinois-based Save Abandoned Babies Foundation has staged this laudatory dollar harvesting event where “saved” babies are paraded around like a new pair of Sunday shoes and their anonymous,invisible mothers who “legally abandoned” them through the state’s Abandoned Newborn Infant Protection Act, are back-patted by police, politicians, professional do-gooders, and adopters. Words such as “brave,” “courageous,” “loving,” and “responsible” get thrown at these unknown women faster than a sidewalk hooker works a traffic jam. It is assumed that if these unfortunate mothers didn’t possess one or more of those sterling Republican qualities they’d drown, smother, stab, shoot, bash, or garrot their “inconvenient” newborns. The term “adoption plan” never enters the heads of the bay-bee savers. Ditto the subversive idea that with help “desperate mothers” (the favored descriptor) could keep their babies if they wanted to instead of depending on the kindness of the nearest cop shop. In the weird Manachaen world view of Continue Reading →