The mindset behind “safe abandonment” laws does not alleviate this shame, but contributes to it. It encourages those already hiding their pregnancy to continue to do so, in the hopes that the “problem” will go away, and Mom and Dad need never know. It gives the clear message that unwed pregnancy is indeed so awful, and shameful that the state gives the legally sanctioned option of hiding it forever. A baby can be dropped off with less care than a puppy or kitten, and with less information than animal shelters require. What does this teach our daughters about responsibility, problem-solving, and forgiveness? The choice is “murder or lie.” Where is compassion here? Where is the opportunity for the mother to get counseling and support in making a choice with life-long repercussions.”
Maryanne Cohen, Birthmother, Publisher and Editor, Origins, Spring 2000
NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS/MAJOR MEDIA:
*The law (in Texas) isn’t working, and people are asking why.
Debbe Magnusen, Project Cuddle, San Francisco Examiner, January 20, 2000
*I took a poll of our girls and without exception they said they would prefer to seek help from a non-profit. Many of them have experience with the system and don’t want the child put there.
Laurie Larson, Project Cuddle, Court TV, January 21, 2000
*I’m not for anything that makes abandonment easier. I want questions asked so the child won’t wonder some day: What’s my medical background? Am I at risk for sickle cell? For breast cancer? You’re condemning someone to a lifelong question: “Who am I?”
Judy Hay, Texas Children’s Protective Services , USA Today (nd), quoted in Boston Globe, February 23, 2000
*This idea may have some merit, but it does seem like a knee-jerk reaction. It probably feels like a good idea to people, and may even help a baby in some isolated cases….but I think it has a lot of pitfalls and certainly doesn’t even try to address the root causes of the problem.
John Krall, Chief Analyst for the National Abandoned Infants Research Center, University of California at Berkeley, Boston Globe, February 23, 2000.
*I'd rather encourage people in those circumstances to talk to someone in a confidential setting about options so she can make a dignified choice rather than send out a message that she can dump her kid and nothing will happen.
Joan Hollinger, Family Law Attorney, Visiting Professor, UC-Berkeley, US News and World Report, February 28, 2000
*These girls don’t want anything to do with the system, including a hospital. They want a connection with a person who will help them, and we give them that.”
Laurie Larson, Project Cuddle, USA Today, February 29, 2000
*The real problem is a society that sends powerful but mixed messages. Sex is glorious, sex is shameful. The result is pregnant teens who can’t even acknowledge that they are pregnant. A program like Mobile’s may help some girls, but it’s a Band-Aid after the fact.”
Michael McGee, Education Director, Planned Parenthood, USA Today, February 29, 2000
*Why have the government pay to educate people on how to abandon their baby when we can educate them I how to prevent it?
Debbe Magnusen, Project Cuddle, Chicago Tribune, March 9, 2000
*The state of mind of most young women faced with these kinds of decisions won’t allow them to consider the legality or illegality of the issue.
Ellen Atkins, forensic psychologist who testified in the high-profile case of PA teenager Melissa Seaner, Fox News, March 15, 2000
*I believe the actual outcome of this package of bills would be that parents would leave even children who are older with emergency service providers….And we must consider the long-term effects on children of being abandoned by their parent (or parents) without information. The child’s genetic, medical and social history would be unknown. This package of bills is a nightmare for the children of Michigan. For those of us who work with adoption daily, who work with children who need permanency in their lives, who work with parents who are unable to parent their children, we know there are alternatives. The public needs to know this, too.
Janis J. Weaver, Director of the Adoption Law Center, Berkeley, CA, and an adoptive mother, Detroit News, April 19, 2000
*It’s a very human and understandable reaction to these tragic events, but the chances for efficacy are doubtful, just because of the type of women we’re dealing with.
Teresa Wagner, Policy Analyst for Sanctity of Life Issues, Family Research Council, The Washington Times, April 30, 2000
*If a girl has kept the pregnancy hidden from friends and family, it’s a big fallacy to believe she’ll waltz into an emergency room to give it up.
Debbie Magnusen, Project Cuddle, San Francisco Weekly, May 3-9, 2000
*If there are 100 problems within the child welfare arena, the abandonment of infants ranks between No. 99 and 100 in severity. Far closer to the top were the cases of the 31,000 babies taken from their mothers after birth last year because they were born with illegal drugs in their bodies….
Patrick T. Murphy, Public Guardian of Cook County Illinois, New York Times, June 26, 2000
*It's not enough for a woman to drop off her baby with a firefighter. There's something disturbing going on in this woman's life, and someone as to make it their business to find out what it is.
Adrienne Verelli, former Planned Parenthood spokesperson, Ms Magazine, October-November 2000
*There are a lot of questions. There are services that are available to these women A lot of folks have worked hard to make sure there are health clinics and access to prenatal care. What's making this group of women do this?….Why aren't they accessing those services?
Joyce Johnson, Child Welfare League of America, Washington Post, October 6,
2000
*The intent of all these measures [legalized baby abandonment laws] may be admirable, but the politicians haven't thought through the implications. Rather than basing a solution on the hospital model, or searching for ways to assist distraught mothers or locate the babies' other relatives, they have created an easy out, perhaps even incentive for young women in crisis who obviously aren't thinking clearly. So, while the babies may be dumped in nicer places, there's a huge risk that official permission will lead to more dumping. This approach also guarantees that few of the parents who wind up caring for these infants will receive personal or medical data to help them or to share, while the children will never be able to find out about themselves because, just as in China and other nations that have systematized infant abandonment, the law doesn't require that any questions be asked.
Adam Pertman, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America. New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 216.
*One of our concerns is that there’s been a rush to pass this legislation without much background information, without the research. There are just a lot of unknown questions.
Joyce Gray Johnson, Child Welfare League of America, Sacramento Bee, January 7, 2001
*And is the message we want to be sending—you can discard children with no questions asked?
Joyce Gray Johnson, Child Welfare League of America, Arizona Republic, 2, 2001
*Insufficient hearings are held at state after state after state. They are just railroaded through….It almost never happens that a woman who would have abandoned her child unsafely sees a safe haven and drops her baby there. These young women who are dropping their children off at safe havens are for the most part women who would have been prime candidates to go a more traditional adoption route, where the child would have had information and the mother would have gotten birth counseling.
Adam Pertman, author, Adoption Nation. Chicago Tribune, February 18, 2001
*One of the problems of this law is that, by anonymously leaving their child, these women also for the most part leave no health histories and no information at all about the child’s ethnic background, and that s a real problem now that we know many illnesses, physical and mental, have genetic roots. And it really poses, over the long term, a health risk for these babies not to know anything about their health history and not be able to have any contact with their biological families, even for informational purposes.
Cindy Freidmutter, Executive Director, Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, Chicago Tribune, March 21, 2001.
*But a hard question needs to be asked before this idea goes too far: By making such “drop offs” safe and easy, is society actually saving lives or really just encouraging abandonment of babies?….Lawmakers should guarantee safe harbors for both mother and baby. That would allow for a mother to have a change of heart at some point before legal adoption, or at least provide vital information about herself to the adoptive parents of the baby….Better reform on this troublesome issue will come when lawmakers take a larger and longer view, and do not resort to what may appear on the surface to be a logical quick fix.
Editorial, Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2001
*I can’t imagine my own daughter doing something like that. I can’t because I helped raise her to be better than that. We have a family and we have certain values and priorities. They call them family values. They (legalized abandonment supporters) think they invented them.
Bud Beck, editor and publisher, Mountain Laurel Review, April 18, 2001
*There may be domestic violence involved, or incest. The point is, we don’t know because we’re not asking the questions.
Joyce Gray Johnson, Child Welfare League of America, Women’s eNews, May 16, 2001
*We think there is a need to think things through a little more.
Sally Sutton, Executive Director Maine Civil Liberties Union, Women’s eNews, May 16, 2001
FROM THE STATES:
ARIZONA:
*What about the mothers? Are we giving them a free pass?
Elizabeth Reyes, whose adopted daughter Esperanza was abandoned in a garbage can at birth. Arizona Republic, January 2, 2001
ARKANSAS:
*We’re targeting irresponsible parents. I just think we need to have some safeguards built in.
Lisa McGee, Attorney, Arkansas Human Services Department, Conway Log Cabin Democrat, January 12, 2001.
CALIFORNIA:
*[the new law might] encourage more people to abandon their babies. Every woman who's suffered from postpartum depression, two weeks after she's given birth to a baby, is going to have thoughts of: "Gosh, maybe I should give my baby."
Mark Washington, President, Capitol Resources Institute, CNN, quoted in California Healthline, March 20, 2000
*The bill is primarily intended to provide an alternative to panicked teenagers. In those distressing cases where teenagers hid a baby in a trash can behind the house, or in the bathroom at the school prom, it seem unlikely that a teenager would be willing to step outside the house or the school bathroom and risk being discovered regardless of the criminal nature of the abandonment.
Donna S. Herskhowitz, Counsel to the California Assembly Judicial Committee, San Francisco Weekly, May 3-9, 2000
*It’s a mistake to let fear, and a few incidents, drive a child welfare policy.
Rep. Dion L. Aroner, California House, San Francisco Weekly, May 3-9, 2000
*Adopted children need to know about their biological family’s medical history and heritage.
Robert Crowe, Board President, Post-Adoption Center for Education and Research, Sacramento Press-Enterprise, May 4, 2000
COLORADO:
*Apparently the formal process of giving a child up for adoption is too burdensome for some people, the paperwork too tedious. SB 171 is the equivalent of a 3-day, no questions asked warranty on every child. What’s that? You changed your mind about the little tyke? The awesome responsibility getting you down? No problem. Just be sure to drop the kid off at a fire station before the warranty expires and—hurray—you’ll be footloose once again.
Vincent Carroll, columnist, Denver Rocky Mountain News, February 6, 2000
*Would the offer of a few days (up to 45 in the version that passed the Senate) to abandon a baby after birth really save lives? To accept this, you must first believe that it is no big deal—no major risk—for society to revise a message of utter moral clarity: Parents, don’t dare abandon your kids. It’s wrong, and we will prosecute you if you do. If you can’t take care of your children, give them up for adoption. But don’t think you can have a child and then discard it without so much as a glance over your shoulder. Once society gives the green light to abandoning babies in the first days or weeks of their lives, won’t it be harder to insist that abandoning babies at six months is still intolerable?…. It is ironic that such laws are becoming the rage at a time when an increasing number of adopted Americans are trying to find out more about their biological families history. Those abandoned under this law will be able to find out nothing.
Editorial, Denver Rocky Mountain News, March 27, 2000
*[The legislation] is going to elevate abandonment into a new fundamental right.
Rep. Mark Pashall (R), Colorado House, Denver Post, March 29, 2000
*This bill just takes us in the wrong direction. It will create moral confusion.
Rep. Don Lee ( R), Colorado House, Denver Post, March 29, 2000
*We are creating circumstances that might require a public service campaign, and I don’t want to spend one nickel or one minute teaching how to abandon a baby.
Rep. Gloria Leyba (D), Colorado House, (who supported the Colorado proposal with grave reservations.) Denver Post, March 29, 2000
*This is a classic case of legislators saying, “We’ll pass a law to solve a problem,” and then nothing happens. The remedy here is the importance of community, family and teaching people how to resolve their problems.
Jim Chapman Chapman, Executive Director, Rocky Mountain Family Council, The Washington Times, April 9, 2001.
*And because of that disconnect from reality, there isn’t a law or a punishment imaginable that is likely to influence the more than 30,000 (sic) women who abandon their babies each year.
Dian Carman, op-ed piece, The Denver Post, April 12, 2001.
CONNECTICUT:
*As a bloodless issue of public health and safety, Connecticut’s safe-harbor law has its certain charms. But the state imprimatur for child dumping, with no shame and no blame and no punishment—and no mandatory counseling or hard questioning—is distasteful, if not breathtakingly amoral.
Editorial Hartford Courant, March 29, 2001
*Safe-haven laws intervene too late in the lives of the women they are targeting. Women who are walking around in denial about their pregnancy are not getting adequate medical care or counseling and are not able to think about adoption or other options for the baby.
Editorial, Hartford Courant, April 19, 2001
DELAWARE:
*The women are doing what seems to the onlooker to be totally irrational, irresponsible and crazy. But for that woman, in her desperation, there doesn’t seem to be any other way.”
Lydia Durbin, Program Manager for Foster Care and Adoption Services at Children & Family First., Associated Press, March 30, 2000
*It (proposed baby abandonment law in Delaware), “sounds absolutely wonderful. But it’s absolutely outrageous. It devalues life, it condemns the child to a lifetime of not knowing about herself, and it won’t work.
Jennifer Layon, adopted after being left in a trash can in a Boston hotel 29 years ago, when she was a few days old, Boston Globe, February 10, 2000
FLORIDA:
There’s going to be fathers out there with rights to children who are not going to be notified about these baby dumpings.
Lois Frankel (D), Florida House, Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel, April 25, 2000.
GEORGIA:
*The baby cries, drop it off at the emergency room. The baby is deformed, drop it off at the emergency room. The baby is the wrong gender, drop it off. The baby’s an inconvenience drop it off.
Rep. Tracy Stallings, (D), Georgia House, Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 4, 2000
ILLINOIS:
*It’s an easy way out. It’s another Band0Aid to a real problem. I think if we allow a vehicle for them to abandon their children (legally) you’re going to see more of it.
Rev. Thomas Walker, Main Street Church of the Living God, Decatur, Illinois, Decatur Herald & Review, April 1, 2001
KANSAS:
*We’re suggesting that people leave babies at police and fire stations. We’ve got the ultimate disposable society then, haven’t we?
Sen. Ed Pugh (R ) Kansas Senate, Topeka Capital-Journal, April 29, 2000
KENTUCKY:
*There may be other children at home that (perpetrator) may be going back to. (referring to the possible abuse of the abandoned baby)
Viola Miller, Secretary, Kentucky Cabinet for Families and Children, Cincinnati Enquirer, January 18, 2001
MARYLAND:
*The idea sounds like apple pie. But what about the parent that's not there? There are two parents to every child. Are you going to do this without some form of due notice?
Del. Joseph Vallario (D), Chair, Maryland House Judiciary Committee, Baltimore Sun, February 16, 2001
*I think you're going to get this bill shoved on the floor. We really haven't allowed this concept to mature quite yet. There are many unanswered questions.
Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell ( R), Maryland House, Baltimore Sun, March 10, 2001
*First, we're making it legal to abandon a baby. And there is no provision to notify a father. Children have two parents.
Del. Joseph M. Getty ( R), Maryland House, Baltimore Sun, March 10, 2001
MICHIGAN:
*Our concern for the baby that gets dropped off is that the baby has no history, no medical history and no way of knowing about his or her heritage.
Nancy Rebar, Associate Director, Oakland Family Services, The Oakland Press (Pontiac), March 29, 2000
MINNESOTA:
*Without requiring the mother to identify herself at the hospital, a child might be the victim of abduction, dropped at the hospital by an angry family member or neighbor. And what of the birth father? In Minnesota, the Father’s Registry has been an advocate for men seeking custody of infants born to partners. A man can research the birth of a child through the name of the mother. But if the mother is anonymous, the father’s search will be fruitless. Furthermore, adoption of an anonymous abandoned baby will be fraught with risk. Adoptive families coming forward to create a home for an abandoned infant will chance the possible emergence of surprise family members seeking custody.
Rev. Kristine Holmgren, Presbyterian minister and the Coordinator of Advocacy for The Children’s Home Society of Minnesota, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 30, 2000
MISSOURI:
*It’s potentially dangerous anytime you make it easy for parents to abdicate their responsibility.
Paul Morrison, Johnson County District Attorney, Kansas City Star, April 3, 2000
NEBRASKA:
*This (changing state law) is premature for Nebraska and sets the mental health practices back to the dark ages.
Donna Tubach-Davis, Director, Child Saving Institute, Lincoln Journal Star, October 28, 2000
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
What if the person who is dropping off the child is not the mother? There are a million ”what ifs’ here.
Rep. Charles LaVerdiere (D) New Hampshire House, Foster’s Daily Democrat, April 13, 2001.
NEW JERSEY:
[These laws] are sort of a quick fix. It makes legislators feel they are doing something, but they are not taking on the harder issues. We would do better I we focused on ways of preventing unintended pregnancies.
Susan Wilson, Executive Coordinator, Network, for Family Life Education, Rutgers University School of Social Work. New Jersey Star Ledger, April 30, 2001
NORTH CAROLINA:
*We’re sending the wrong message. Go out there, reproduce like rabbits, just be sure to drop them off with someone within 15 days.”
Rep. Ronnie Sutton (D), North Carolina House, Greensboro News-Record, March 28, 2001
*There’s no degree of personal responsibility [for parents]. It says “do what you will, get it to anyone or anything and walk away from it.”
Rep. Gene Arnold ( R) North Carolina House, Greensboro News-Record, March 28, 2001
*We’re totally supportive of the concept of attempting to save the life of these children….But there must be a better way.
John Rustin, North Carolina Family Policy Council, Greensboro News Record, March 28, 2001
*We’re literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. There is no degree of responsibility for the person who had the child. I think this bill needs to be referred somewhere…. probably the trashcan.
Rep. Gene Arnold (R ) Ashville Citizen-Times News, March 28, 2001
*I’m not totally for or against it (HB 660) I believe there should be another step—more education about options preferably before delivery…. I’m not sure I would have taken my baby to a hospital. I would have been afraid that there would be cameras that could identify me and I would be prosecuted. I wasn’t of a mind to make a sound decision.
Twyana Davis, Columbus Dispatch, April 27, 2000
*I think that public policy should reinforce the notion that children are precious and valuable. (speaking against Ohio's safe haven proposal)
Gary Crow, Executive Director, Lorain County Children's Services, Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 12, 2000
*….a simplistic answer to a very complex problem.
Betsie Norris, Executive Director, Adoption Network Cleveland, Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 12, 2000
*I'm definitely against it, only because I think it promotes infant abandonment. In my situation, I think if I would have had someone to talk to, it would have made it a lot easier to tell someone. I don't think that in my mind state, after delivering a baby, I would have been conscious enough to think, "Oh, let me take it to the hospital."
Twyana Davis, Akron Beacon Journal, October 26, 2000
*I think it's a poor public policy. I think it sends the wrong message. I think in some ways it can cheapen the value of human life.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R), Ohio House, WCHM Channel 4, Columbus, Ohio, November 2, 2000
*It seems to me we're asking an awful easy way out of allowing parents to relinquish responsibility.
Ron Young (R ), Ohio House, WCHM Channel 4, Columbus, Ohio, November 2, 2000
*Yeah, I think in some ways it is taking a step backwards….I would not be saying this if I felt truly that it would take care of all the dumpster babies.
Nancy Burley, owner, private adoption agency, Columbus, Ohio, WCHM Channel 4, November 2, 2000
*[What motive do teens have to avoid premarital sex], "if you know there's very little responsibility and there's an easy resolution to your predicament."
Sen. Doug White ( R), Ohio Senate, CincinnatiEnquirer, November 9, 2000
*I’m not making excuses for what I did. My situation didn't end up the way most cases do. I think there needs to be a step before this law. Instead of just legalizing abandonment, we need more education, more programs for girls to turn to.
Twyana Davis, Toledo Blade, December 17, 2000
OKLAHOMA:
*Perhaps if these women had better access to health care they’d be less likely to make such a choice [dangerous abandonment]. Perhaps if they had better educations, they would know there were other options. Perhaps if sexuality education and family planning weren’t such forbidden topics in some circles, these women wouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place.
Editorial, Tulsa World, March 5, 1999
*You can never, never, never make something right by legalizing something that is wrong.
Rep. Susan Winchester (R ), Oklahoma House, Shawnee News-Star, February 13, 2001
*I think we’re opening up the floodgates for a whole bunch of throwaways. I don’t believe this is the answer.
Rep. Mike O’Neal ( R) , Oklahoma House, Shawnee News-Star, February 13, 2001
*I think it just allows the mother of the child to totally evade her responsibility for her actions I know it’s better than abortion, but I think it is creating almost a right in child abandonment. We are touching the symptoms instead of the real problem and that’s parental responsibility. I just really think we are going down the wrong road.
Rep. Rep. Bill Graves, Oklahoma House, The Daily Oklahoman March 21, 2000
*We’re institutionalizing irresponsibility.
Rep. Bill Graves, Oklahoma House, Shawnee News Star, April 21, 1001
I believe this bill sets up situations where we could have problems that have not occurred before….Having bill boards on Interstate 5 telling Oregonians how to abandon their children is a frightening and confusing idea.”
Helen Hill, Chief Petitioner of Ballot Measure 58 that opened records to Oregon adoptees, Statesman Journal, May 27, 2001
PENNSYLVANIA:
*How do we know that the baby’s not abused? How do we know it’s not kidnapped. We have to investigate.
Police Chief Robert W. McNeilly, Jr, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Inquirer, February 6, 2000
*[the Basket for Babies proposal should be added to the] annals of bad ideas with good intentions.
Editorial, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, quoted in California Healthline, March 20, 2000
*We once found a newborn in a picnic basket under a porch in east Liberty, where the mother had placed a bottle and a rattle. She wanted to do the right thing, but she wasn't reality-based. The idea of coming someplace to drop off her baby….I don't think that would have occurred to her.
Cmdr. Gwen Elliot, head, Pittsburgh Police Sex Assault and Family Crisis Unit, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 20, 2000
*It just concerns me we don't do something with prevention to stop young women from coming to this.
Sen. Shirley Kitchen (D), Pennsylvania Senate, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 2000
*But Pennsylvania legislators should heed the concerns of groups and experts whose mission is to save infants' lives--and also the lives of the often-traumatized women who give birth and then death to their newborns. The trouble, say groups including the National Abandoned Infants Assistance Resource Center is that safe-haven laws do very little to solve the abandonment problem and virtually nothing to prevent it.
Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 2000
*I don’t know there’s a lot of trust with the hospitals. If these girls did trust them, why didn’t they come in for prenatal care in the first place? I would much rather see that money used to promote something like Healthy Start or to reach out to women in the community to encourage them to go for counseling if they don’t think they can keep this baby.
Cmdr. Gwen Eliot, head of Pittsburgh Police’s Sex Assault and Family Crisis Unit. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 20.2000
*I would have to assume there is also a father who might not be a bad guy. His baby is missing, and he has no way of knowing where it is.
Sen. Ken Albers, South Dakota Senate, Rapid City Journal, January 24, 2001
*What if the father has a summer job in Alaska? He may very well have known his wife was pregnant and that she gave birth. He may not know she gave it away.
Sen. Fred Whiting, South Dakota Senate, Rapid City Journal, January 25, 2001
TENNESSEE:
*These are not women likely to walk into a hospital and turn over their children.
Jane Chittick, Director, Tennessee Department of Children's Services, Tennessee, February 27, 2001
*The General Assembly has to decide if we need this. The fact is that this does create an avenue for undoing five years of work on the General Assembly's part on our adoption laws.
Caprice East, adoption advocate, Tennessean, February 27, 2001
*However, there is currently no data available to support the need for legislation to address this issue in Tennessee. The Child Fatality Review Team and the Tennessee Children's Justice Task Force should review the incidents and circumstances of abandoned babies and identify the need for legislation, if any, and the provisions that should be included in that legislation.
Linda O'Neal, Executive Director, Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, Tennessean, March 13, 2001
*There are basic principles involved. To allow a person to come in and surrender a child without any requirement as to collecting background information of that child, who the other parent is, that is just unconscionable.
Rep. Doug Jackson (D), Tennessee House, Tennessean, March 13, 2001.
*I still have a hard time thinking that people, who are so emotionally in a state of upheaval that they were going to put a child in a dumpster, are going to say "oh, no. The Tennessee legislature gave us a safe haven and I'm going to run it down to the hospital."
Sen. Larry Trail (D), Tennessee House, Tennessean, March 13, 2001
*There are just so many unanswered questions. The intentions are great; when I first heard about the concept I thought it was great. But the more you look into it, the more questions there….What would happen, for example, if some disgruntled relative or somebody else grabbed a newborn from a mother in Indiana who did not want to give up the baby and turns it in at a fire station in Tennessee and nobody has asked questions about the child's identity there is no way to trace it back to its parents?"
Rep. Joe Fowlkes, (D), Chair Select Committee on Children and Youth, Tennessee General Assembly. Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 15, 2001
*[the bill doesn't solve the problem in that it treats infants like property] to be picked up by the Salvation Army.
Sen. David Fowler (R) Tennessee Senate, Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 24, 2001
*I understand that in Germany, they've got drop-in chutes [for babies] like those we have for returning videos. Why don't we just go ahead and establish a drop-in chute here? We will make a situation where people can just drop off babies and go back and make more babies. We're going to say "You can have a baby but you don't you don't have to raise it."
Rep. John DeBerry (D) Tennessee House, Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 30, 2001
*What is going to stop some guy who doesn’t want to establish paternity, who doesn’t want to pay child support, who doesn’t want to raise a child to 18 years from saying, “Hey we got a law in Tennessee that says all you do, Betty Jean, is take the baby down there and drop him off. You don’t have to tell who the daddy is or the momma is or the baby’s name. Just leave him and go. How does this make any sense?
Rep. John DeBerry (D) Tennessee House, Tennessean, May 30, 2001
*I can imagine some out there saying if it [a newborn] is not pretty, just drop it off. If it's not healthy, just drop it off. I have to speak against this bill because what we propose to do with this is to stretch the boundaries of morality where evil is good and good is evil.
House Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry (D), Tennessee House, Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 30, 2001
*What we need to focus our energy on in my opinion is not notifying women how to get rid of their babies after they’ve delivered the baby, but getting to those women ahead of time and explaining to them that there are options available when you do deliver so you can have a normal adoption and collect the information we need and property terminate the rights of the biological parents.
Sen. David Fowler ( R), Tennessee Senate, stateline.org, June 1, 2001
TEXAS:
*Elizabeth Banderwerf, director of Abrazo Adoption Associates in Texas says safe drops could lead to a new generation of adopted children stripped of their medical histories and genetic heritage. She supports England’s system of treating infant abandonment as a bonafide mental illness with help offered to the mother who will either agree to place her child for adoption or learn to parent.
Jacquelyn Mitchard, columnist, Gwinnett Daily Post (GA), April 13, 2000
WASHINGTON:
*We in government should be there to give them options so they just don't come along and say, "this is too much for us, we're going to leave…..I don't care what kind of law you pass, you're still going to have people abandoning babies."
Clyde Ballard (R ), Co-speaker, Washington House of Representatives, Seattle Sunday Times, February 17, 2001
ENGLAND:
*The consumerist society in which we are endlessly urged to pursue our own fulfillment began to emerge at the same time as another transforming influence: the welfare state. Suddenly it was possible for us not to feel too badly about shedding some of our personal obligations because we knew that any casualties would be looked after. The German mother can dump her baby through the letter box precisely because the German state is there to pick up the tab.
John Humphreys, The Sunday Times (London), March 12, 2000
GERMANY:
*It’s creating disposable children for the disposable society.
Statement from unnamed German religious organization, ABC News, March 7, 2000.
*Charges must be brought against the first person who leaves their child there {Hamburg Infant Chute}.
Viviane Spethmann, Christian Democrat Hamburg City Councilor, Bild, quoted in The Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel, March 8, 2000.
Updated August 16, 2001
Copyright 2001, Marley Elizabeth Greiner