An independent voice for ethical adoption
The Consequences of Safe Haven Laws
I teach my children to look at both the small picture and large picture in given situations. If one of them listens to friends and does something stupid on a dare, I want them to think about the consequences of that action, but also to think about what consequences await them in similar, but larger circumstances. For example, one of my children was recently in trouble for throwing a rock that hit a classroom window. No one was hurt, a teacher was mad, but after appropriate apologies were made everything was fine. The lesson I drove home to my child was that doing something because of a dare, without thinking, can lead to dire consequences sometimes, such as a person being injured by the same rock.
I have been thinking about how our nation’s safe haven laws are similar. Fifty states have enacted safe haven laws in recent years. Nebraska’s recent law created huge consequences. It was poorly written and as a result, parents have dropped off over 30 kids, most of them teenagers. We all hear the news reports and imagine pained, scared, teenagers not knowing what was going to happen to them, if they would ever see their parents and extended families again. We imagine them floating in foster care until they age out and wonder if the connections to their parents will ever be repaired again, or whether they are irretrievably broken. We picture a family so damaged by whatever came before this decision, trying to move forward, but finding more pain and more damage around the corner after this almost unbelievable decision has been made to permanently sever family ties. We wonder what could have been done to help them before this decision was made, and what help any of them might get to heal from it afterwards.
As I do with my children, I’d like us to look at the other end of the spectrum of these laws. It is easier to see the dropping of a newborn baby off at a fire station as a good thing. It is easier to focus on the “saving” of the baby, and the happiness that comes from that child finding a new home with adoptive parents who have longed for a baby. Is that really all there is to think about with infant abandonment laws, though? Can we really turn our backs on the same concerns we so clearly see with teenage abandonment?
Can’t we imagine that the birthmother of the newborn child is in some type of dire trouble and needs help? Can’t we imagine that there is likely a great deal of pain behind a decision to abandon a baby, just when one abandons a teenager? How might that person have been helped before making such a decision? How might we all as a society support organizations that help keep such families together? Just because a newborn baby cannot vocalize or even cognitively feel the loss of his or her mother doesn’t mean the pain is not there. Ask most adoptive parents if their children feel pain at some point over their adoptions and you will find that many feel that pain quite acutely. Can we find ways to lessen the need for these abandonments? The newborn baby also loses not just a mother, but also a father somewhere, often without the father ever knowing the child existed. The child also loses extended family. It is easy to see that keeping an older child connected to extended family is beneficial, but somehow we forget that retaining that connection in infant adoption is important and valuable too. Safe haven laws make it possible for a newborn child to lose all of those connections forever.
It appears universally agreed that the Nebraska law allowing teenagers to be abandoned wasn’t a good idea. I challenge the lawmakers in every state to recognize that these laws don’t make sense in any state, for any age. Rather, we need to find ways to offer services to mothers, fathers, and children in crisis. They need to have options for support in choosing to parent or well-thought out decisions to relinquish not made in crisis and where medical and birth information is retained for the child.
There is no doubt that there are better ways to handle families with teenagers in crisis, but let’s not forget to look at the other end of the spectrum to find better ways to help families with newborns in crisis as well.
Melissa Griebel
President
Ethica
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