Safe-haven baby boxes offer hope to desperate mothers.
‘A t noon on Thursday, a crowd gathered outside the Wapakoneta Fire Department, their eyes looking at the small but powerful addition to the building: the new Safe Haven Baby Box,” according to a local news report. “With one simple cut of the red ribbon, Wapakoneta became a place where a desperate mother might find hope, and a newborn could be given a second chance at life.”
Just gave birth secretly in your apartment? Don’t know what to do next? There may be a safe-haven baby box near you where you can leave your baby, no questions asked.
Wapakoneta, Ohio (which, according to the city’s website, is “the proud hometown of Neil Armstrong”), has the most recently established safe-haven box in the U.S., and it can be lifesaving for a newborn. “This box is a sign of hope,” a local pastor said. “The babies who are placed here may not have had much hope at the start, but being placed in this box means they now have endless possibilities.” And “it means their lives are not over before they’ve even begun.”
The safe-haven box in Wapakoneta isn’t much different from similar installations throughout the country. A key feature is an alarm that sounds to alert firefighters to the presence of a baby in need of adult care and gives the mother enough time to walk away without being seen. There are no cameras. The woman’s right to privacy, so to speak, is protected. The idea behind the approach is to give a desperate mother hope that her child can live a happy life with people who are equipped to raise her.
When I was young and naïve, I thought safe-haven boxes were a sign that the final judgment was upon us. Not only was abortion throughout pregnancy legal all over the United States by Supreme Court diktat, we were also actively encouraging mothers to abandon their babies, I thought (as though safe-haven boxes functioned like commercials for ice cream or potato chips: see a sign for a safe-haven box, give up your baby to strangers, no questions asked, no regrets or repercussions). Of course, like an abortion, the act of leaving a baby in a safe-haven box is something you live with for the rest of your life. Thanks be to God, however, that in the case of a safe-haven drop-off, there’s some hope for the child. It’s an option — offered by people with good intentions who care for children and their mothers — that does not require paperwork and questions, lawyers and meetings. But you will never see your child again: you’ve sacrificed the gift of a continuing bond with your child and given to others the gift of his life. You will not know him. Depending on your condition, maybe you can be grateful for that option. Maybe you can take comfort in the realization that you did something tremendous at a frightening time in your life.
I remember being 21 or 22 and arguing with the then-president of the National Council for Adoption about this. I thought that by advocating safe-haven laws, William Pierce was going to increase the number of mothers who walk away from their children and inadvertently increase abortions, too, by coarsening our culture. Pierce knew better and was patient with the child (me!). I suspect that I was mad at him also for encouraging adoption, which, of course, even in the best of situations, is an unnatural rupture of the bond between a biological parent and his or her child. But sometimes it is necessary. For example, Darcy Olsen, president of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, is especially adamant that parents with a meth addiction should relinquish their parental rights as soon as possible, for the sake of the child. The best interests of the child always need to be the priority. Safe-haven boxes help move us in the right direction.
At the same time, safe havens should give us pause. They should prompt a societal examination of conscience among the residents of every city where they exist, such as Wapakoneta. What can we do to ensure that no mother feels so desperate as to leave her baby with no real possibility of contact? What more can we do to protect mother and child, together? Child-welfare advocates often seem to favor kinship care — find a relative, even if there has been no prior relationship between the child and that adult family member. That’s not necessarily what’s always best for the child, but we should generally want to keep family in the picture. The safe-haven box should be an infrequently chosen emergency option.
When Pierce died of cancer in 2003, Bruce Chapman, founder of the Discovery Institute, said: “I believe that there are scores of thousands of lives that have been bettered, and thousands whose very survival resulted from Bill’s tireless adoption efforts alone.” I hope that, in heaven, he has forgiven me for not realizing the wisdom of elders.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.