Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization
www.bastards.org 614-372-5535 @bastardsunite
I am writing on behalf of Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization, the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We are asking you to VETO SB168—Amendment to Safe Haven Act—which authorizes the installation of baby drop off boxes (aka newborn devices) at various state and private facilities.
For the last 20 years adoptee rights, adoption reform, and child welfare advocates have opposed state Safe Haven laws as inimical to child’s best interest standards, unethical, and unnecessary. Although, the current baby drop box initiative is a natural outgrowth of the Safe Haven movement, the National Safe Haven Alliance and individual state Safe Haven organizations—the very people who developed Safe Haven laws—oppose SB168. While Bastard Nation and allies remain opposed to Safe Haven laws we share many of NSHA concerns–with our own specific objections.
Baby Box advocates promote boxes as an easy solution for mothers so “desperate” that unless they can dump their newborns anonymously in a box in a wall they will kill their babies or at best discard them dangerously. Proponents appear to view all mothers, then, as potential abusers and murderers.
As a result of their negative view advocates claim that even Safe Haven laws, with their anonymous “relinquishment” provisions, are tricky and dangerous. Women, to be “safe” they claim, must have the ability shortly after birth to skulk around dark obscure (but “prominent”) spots outside hospitals, fire or police stations to drop their babies into a box like trash and walk away. No one will ever have to know.
Bastard Nation and adoptee rights activists believe the implementation of Baby Boxes:
• Creates a parallel child welfare system that rejects informed consent and a full record of identifying information and social and medical histories of the newborn. Their use eliminates adoptees’ right to identity by denying their access to original birth and heritage records.
• Replaces professional best practice standards with unprofessional and unethical “relinquishment” by letting parents abandon solely for convenience or out of ignorance with no counseling paper-signing or discussion on alternatives such as government and private financial and material assistance for family preservation, temporary foster care, and legitimate adoption planning.
• Denies the non-surrendering parent the right of custody and to rear her or his own child. There is no mechanism in place to prove that the “surrendering” person has the legal right to do so. Abusive, embarrassed, or frightened partners, spouses or family members can use drop boxes without consent or knowledge of the (other) parent. With no repercussions.
• Disenfranchises natural parents –particularly the non-surrendering parent (usually the father) –their right to due process by eliminating their ability to locate the child; thus denying them knowledge of (among other things) the dependency proceeding to which they are a party.
• Contravenes the family reunification guidelines of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act and parts of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act and tribal rights which can cause federal litigation.
• Encourages women to keep problematic pregnancy a secret by discouraging them from seeking family and professional communication, to seek assistance for sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, substance abuse, and social isolation—factors that cause nearly every newborn discard. Studies indicate that once a pregnancy is acknowledged and discussed the chance of discard is almost always abolished.
• Discourages women from seeking pre-and post-natal care and to give unsafe unattended birth.
• Hides crime such as rape, incest, and spousal and partner abuse.
We are also concerned with issues liability, safety, and economics.
Baby Boxes are anti-adoptee, anti-adoption, and anti-family. They are a direct attack on adoptee civil rights, fathers rights, and ICWA. They fly in the face of contemporary child welfare practice and are a punch in the head to adoptees. Baby Boxes do not empower women and certainly not their abandoned children as they grow up, They trivialize pregnancy, commodity babies, and maintain adoption secrets and lies. They are promoted as an easy solution to very complex problems, and in the end, leave everyone behind. Certainly, there are better solutions.
Please veto SB168.
Thank you,
Marley Greiner
Executive Chair
New York Adoptee Rights Coalition
I’m an adult adoptee, and I wholeheartedly agree that this bill is an egregious violation of the rights a child has to know their history. I find the notion that one parent, absent the knowledge of the other, could place the infant, particularly chilling.
The health concerns for baby and mother are also alarming.