This new thing is making me feel so much…well, WRATH. “Don’t want that fetus? Don’t abort it! How about go through all the trouble and anguish of giving birth, and then just put that baby in this box!”
Seriously, WTF?
The slots open to reveal “baby boxes”– heated, padded, incubator-type holes in the wall where, according to Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc – one of the pro-life organisations behind the initiative – desperate mothers or fathers can deposit a newborn anonymously and walk away, reassured that it is safe. Once a baby has been deposited, an internal alarm alerts firefighters on duty to come and pick it up.
Why oh why do so many Christians get away with imposing THEIR superstitions on other people? (Rhetorical question, maybe.)
Plus, like a Guardian commenter says,
I can’t wait for them to start making the adult size boxes for all of the people that are out in the cold and need to stay safe and warm. Pro-life is pro-life right?! Oh wait, no it’s not, pro-life is just where you decide that someone should be brought into this world and then left to fend for themselves. Because pro-life doesn’t care if they get a decent education, decent healthcare, enough nutrition, etc. In fact, when it gets bad enough, pro-lifers even support the death penalty. Irony? Not really.
Yes, not exactly a new thing (as the article notes), but new in the U.S., far as I know. And also the latest weapon in the multipronged war against safe, readily available access to abortion. Despite its legality.
This fuckin’ state. I swear to fucking god I’m so sick of some of the people here. Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of Hoosiers that are perfectly awesome. But there’s a strain of smug, superiorist, humblebraggart, anti-intellectual here that drive me up the fucking wall. When I lived in the South, if people were going to act like assholes, they wouldn’t pretend they were doing you a favor at the same time.
Look, in principle, Safe Havens aren’t a bad idea and I like that there’s a relatively easy trouble free way for people without good options to give up a child. I do not like that I live in a state with patchwork sex-ed, no support for children and families, and for all intents and purposes NO abortion.
Do you know what happened today? My girlfriend texted me after having seen the doctor. She wrote that the doctor “had a message for you.” (Meaning me.) For five seconds of existential terror, I thought she might be pregnant before I realized that she would not be coy about that shit. Existential terror because if I had a kid, this would be the shittiest state to raise them in. Okay, maybe not the shittiest, but we’re handing out emergency teaching licenses instead of paying teachers more because our capitol buildings are full of retrofuck dickheads that fucking LOVE to talk about god and country and being pro-life while social fabric that holds communities together and keeps families healthy fucking rots to nothing.
This is where that precious sickly presumptuousness I was talking about comes in. “What? How are you not pro-life? How can anyone be for abortion? We’re just doing things the way they’re intended to be done. I feel so sorry that you think this is a problem. You’re not upset are you?”
There are so many things wrong with “safe haven” laws.
First, women do not go through an entire pregnancy, give birth to a baby, and then choose between 1) abandoning the baby in a dumpster or 2) abandoning the baby in a baby box like this. It doesn’t work that way in real life. There are too many people desperate for babies. Any young woman with an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy is inundated – from work to church to the store – with offers (for the baby, not financial or home help).
Second, if you read stories about babies who have been turned in this way, it’s noticeable that the people dropping off the babies are almost always not the mother. If your boyfriend or mother-in-law wants to break the connection between you, what better way than to get rid of the baby you have together? There’s no proof babies are being relinquished by their actual mothers. And once a baby is in the box, that’s it. The mother never gets her baby back, whether she just had a bad night and needed a break for 12 hours, or if it was actually taken from her without her consent.
Third, the reason they’re doing tiny boxes like this now is because some states didn’t specify only newborns and found themselves with a lot of relinquished teenagers. Oops.
Meanwhile, these days, a significant portion of relinquished babies are born to married parents. Poverty is what causes the desperation to relinquish. Not shame or youth or irresponsibility. These boxes are based on bigotry and sanctimony, not actual need.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. I just checked the numbers for Hamburg, one of the first two modern-day boxes in Germany, and 2000-2009 they had 38 babies, 14 of whom were returned to their mothers.
But yes, all in all they are considered a failure.
That’s in Germany. In the U.S., there’s a multi-billion-dollar industry in place to move children from undeserving whores to good Christian families, and it’s a one-way ticket.
23 children had been left at Nebraska hospitals, including nine from one family and children from Iowa, Michigan and Georgia. Many were teenagers, only one was younger than 6, and none were babies.
