INDIANA SAFE HAVEN LAWS

There is just something that is totally icky about safe haven laws. I have not even begun to tap on it. Two blogs that touch on it are:

Http://thedailybastardette.blogspot.com/
http://adoptalk.blogspot.com/

I agree with what they both have to say. Safe haven laws don't protect the child. It doesn't even protect the mother. If a woman goes up to a fire station or hospital bleeding with an umbilical cord still attached to the baby and she is bleeding herself, no help will even be offered if she wants to give her child up for adoption. No questions asked. A majority of these situations are teenage girls. I believe that in order to prevent these very things. We as a society need to change the sexual education these young girls get. Instead of "abstinence", we should really teach them what sex is, what it does to the body, and what it results. If we had honest forthright sexual education, girls and boys would have the information needed to make a good solid decision. Groups like the NCFA support laws like this because the parents identity can never be discovered. Fathers lose their rights completely. They are not even given due process. The children don't have their right to identity and heritage. I think it should be required to have identifying information. It doesn't mean we have to prosecute. All information needs to be given though. The article below is one from my birth state of Indiana. I recently found out that Texas led the way on these types of laws

I found this bit of information at the Alan Guttmacher web page. It is the highlights of safe haven laws.

47 states have legalized relinquishing an infant up to a specified age.
17 states allow someone other than a parent (generally someone designated by a parent) to relinquish the infant.
30 states expressly preserve the anonymity of the person relinquishing the infant
47 states designate the places/personnel authorized to accept an infant
30 states allow emergency services personnel to accept an infant or allow relinquishment through the 911 emergency system.
44 staes authorize health care providesr such as hospitals or health clinic employees to accept the infant.
11 states allow an infant to be relinquished to some other organizations such as a licensed adoption agency or a specific facility designated by the state.
22 states require the person receiving the infant to follow a state approved protocol, including providing both the person leaving the infant and the infaant with identification bracelet to aid with possible reunification, asking for medical information about the infant, and initiating an investigation to determine if the infant is registered as a missing child.

Wow so much protecting the infant's future rights to identity. So much for a father's right to due process.



Safe Haven baby attends hospital reunion

By Frank Gray - The Journal Gazette - Sat, Oct. 21, 2006

(Picture) Laura J. Gardner/The Journal Gazette Nurse Bob Pequinot talks with the area's first Safe Haven baby, now 2 1/2 years old, at Friday's reunion at Parkview North Hospital.

It was past 6 a.m. one day in March 2004 when a young woman, her sweat shirt stained with blood, walked into the Parkview North emergency room carrying a newborn baby, probably about an hour old.
The baby was still bleeding from the umbilical cord, which hadn't been tied off. She was wrapped in only a towel. The woman carrying the baby handed her to emergency room workers, said something to the effect she was a Safe Haven baby, and left, Shirley Thompson, emergency room director at the hospital, said.
Emergency room workers were stunned, but they knew what it was all about. The newborn became the first Safe Haven baby in northeast Indiana, a baby handed over to a safe place under a law that allows mothers who can't keep a baby for whatever reason to abandon them in hospitals or fire stations no questions asked. The law is designed to scared mothers from abandoning babies in trash bins and letting them die.
Hospital workers named her Samantha, after the hospital's Samaritan helicopter, because the nurse who first took the baby is a flight nurse on the helicopter.
Within a couple of days, the baby was gone, delivered to a foster family that had registered as a family willing to adopt any foster child they got. The emergency room workers never saw her again.
Friday, though, the emergency room nurses on hand the day the baby arrived got to meet her again, this time at a reunion held to coincide with a training seminar to teach hospital, school, police and other officials about Indiana's Safe Haven law.
The girl's adoptive parents, who asked not to be named, offered details of the child, who is now 2 1/2 .
"She speaks very proper English. She knows all the words to her songs and makes up her own words sometimes. I want her to see the world and know it's her oyster," her mother said in an interview before the reunion.
Since Samantha was left in 2004, three other babies have been dropped off at hospitals or fire stations in Allen County.
Nationally, a hotline for mothers who can't keep babies has fielded thousands of calls from expectant mothers seeking help. That hotline is 1-877-796-4673.