Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice 9781479883073

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Giving Up Baby

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Giving Up Baby Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice Laury Oaks

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York and London

N EW YORK UN I VE R SIT Y PRE S S New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2015 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-9792-6 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4798-0636-2 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Safe Haven Laws Are Not Only about Saving Babies

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1. The Work of Saving Babies’ Lives and Souls

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2. Girls at Risk of Dumping Their Newborns

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3. Relinquishing Motherhood: How and Why Safe Haven Surrenders Happen

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4. The Unsurpassed Adoption Value of Safe Haven Babies

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Conclusion: Safe Haven Laws and Advancing Reproductive Justice

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Notes

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References

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Back when I regularly read the newspaper and maintained a habit of clipping eye-catching pieces about reproductive politics—compelled by research interests that began when working as an undergraduate abortion rights activist—I created a haphazard file of abandoned newborn cases. These articles introduced me to safe haven laws, and moreover, left unanswered the questions I found most pressing: Who would abandon a newborn and why? What feelings did she experience? Would she ever wish to reunite with her baby? At the 2003 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting held in Chicago, I presented my first attempt to critically analyze safe haven laws and the invisibility of women who relinquished newborns. I offer thanks to Alena Marie and Anna Kaki for their exceptional research assistance and sincere appreciation to Jane Honikman, founder of Postpartum Support International, for getting the research ball rolling through our discussions about the consequences of safe haven laws for the care that mothers deserve. Soon after that conference, I shelved the project in no small part because raising my own infant while analyzing numerous stories about abandoned newborns and imaging their mothers’ experiences felt too burdensome. Years later the reproductive politics surrounding safe haven laws remained fascinating, so I steeled myself, returned to the tattered news clippings file, and mapped out the research that grew into this book. I offer thanks to the many people at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) who moved this research forward. Sherri Barnes, the UCSB librarian for feminist studies, helped shape the scope of this research by introducing me to Zotero, which replaced my old files, and by sharing her vast knowledge with my research assistants and students. I thank her for providing professional and thoughtful index work. Two graduate student research assistants provided a tag-team effort. Chloe Diamond-Lenow led the research team to organize vast amounts of data, trouble-shoot database searches, and serve as our tech expert. Rachel vii

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Rys provided meticulous references checking, formatting, and editing, as well as exceptional photography. May they have equally upbeat research assistants in their future academic careers. A dynamic group of undergraduate students fit working individually or on a research team into their demanding schedules. Their engaged energy and camaraderie sustained my work, and I want them to know how inspiring their own scholar-activism is: Erin Daly, Jessica Moore, Adrianna Alexandrian, Chanelle Johnson, Andrina Moses, Grace Morrison, Rebecca Unruh, and Hannah Levy. Research was supported by a UCSB Academic Senate Faculty Research Grant, University of California Regents Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and UCSB Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research Social Science Research Grant. Colleagues in and affiliated with the UCSB Department of Feminist Studies have backed my reproductive politics research over the years. Christina Toy and Lou Anne Lockwood George have provided far-reaching and generous front office support, knowing how research, teaching, and advising flow together. I especially thank Barbara Herr Harthorn, Barbara Tomlinson, Leila Rupp, and Eileen Boris for their guidance and for reading drafts of different components of this project. I am extremely grateful that Tania Israel shared writing days, working through ideas, delicious lunches, and celebration of each step of this book’s progress. My heartfelt gratitude goes to readers beyond UCSB; Doug English, Nora Jacobson, and Jo Murphy-Lawless answered my repeated requests and urged me to raise my analysis beyond the level of what speaks to me the most, the details. Further, this book honors an interdisciplinary community of courageous scholars and activists working for reproductive justice: my research clearly depends on theirs. At the exact right time, NYU Press senior editor Jennifer Hammer visited UCSB and encouraged me through the proposal stage and writing process. I sincerely thank her for the generous feedback that moved me to sharpen the book, and for her consistently quick replies. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. At NYU Press, Dorothea Stillman Halliday, Constance Grady, Alexia Traganas, and copyeditor Anne Sanow guided me through the nitty-gritty stages of book preparation. Throughout my life I have been surrounded by an extended family of avid readers and overflowing bookshelves. I thank Beth Bales, my sister

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and Billings-based informal research assistant, who alerted me to news stories I would have missed. Doug English has lived with each research project I have conducted for over two decades, and is as ready as I am to relinquish this one due to the energy as well as kitchen bookshelf space it has usurped during this constantly busy time in our lives. May our daughter, Marissa, read and write all of the books she wishes to and always have many full bookshelves.

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Introduction Safe Haven Laws Are Not Only about Saving Babies A candlelight ceremony was held in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Park on a November evening in 2012 to celebrate the 100th and 101st newborns relinquished at Los Angeles County safe haven sites. The event gathered community members, firefighters, hospital workers, parents who adopted infants relinquished at local safe havens, and even young children who were safe haven babies. Absent from the event—though thanked for giving their newborns a second chance— were the mothers who relinquished them and are guaranteed anonymity by safe haven laws (Mather 2012). We are left to imagine the stories that the “safe haven moms” could tell about their experiences, emotions, and lives.

Baby safe haven laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location such as a hospital or fire station, were established with varying stipulations in every US state between 1999 and 2009. Promoted during a time of heated public debate over policies on abortion, sex education, teen pregnancy, adoption, welfare, immigrant reproduction, and child abuse, safe haven laws were passed by the majority of states with little contest. Legislators argued for safe haven laws by citing specific cases of newborns left in unsafe public places, including dumpster bins, church steps, and school restrooms. The images of a newborn left cold, crying, and unprotected by her or his mother and the preventable deaths of such abandoned of newborns are distressing. Elevating these numerically limited but alarming cases of abandoned infants to the status of a social problem, state and nonprofit advocates presented safe haven laws as a “confidential, and safe alternative to newborn abandonment,” and depicted drop-off sites as providing “safe shelter for the youngest and 1

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most vulnerable members of our society” (Baby Moses Project 1996). This heartfelt, simple description of the intent behind safe haven laws, however, does not disclose the cultural work enacted by these laws and their advocates. This book provides a feminist analysis of the social politics of legal infant abandonment in advocacy and media discourses surrounding safe haven laws. Safe haven laws attempt to remedy the problem of abandoned infants by intending to save them, but inadequately address the problem of motherhood for the very small number of women and girls who abandon their newborns: the social injustices that compel abandonment. Indeed, the legal anonymity ensured by safe haven laws severely limits public acknowledgment of the social and political forces that influence the actual experiences and feelings of girls and women who opt to use safe havens. Safe haven discourses make visible images of “good” and “bad” mothers, and promote narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.1 Advocates attempt to save babies from potentially bad mothers who could risk their lives by “dumping” them. Some particularly marginalized women are perceived as unlikely to be good mothers and targeted by safe haven campaigns. Thus, some babies are saved from their own mothers through placement in loving, adoptive families after being surrendered at safe haven sites. In so doing, the so-called safe haven mom, unlike other birth mothers, surrenders the ability to select an adoptive family for her newborn—due to safe haven anonymity guarantees—and may not reunify with her child in the future. Paradoxically, safe haven laws and advocacy urge women to anonymously and permanently relinquish their motherhood status as a way to demonstrate maternal responsibility. Far from being only about saving babies, safe haven laws and the discourses surrounding them reinforce social assumptions about what a good mother should be and how US society should treat women experiencing unplanned pregnancy. The targeting of specific types of future mothers with safe haven information is based on the “stratification of reproduction,” a concept coined by feminist anthropologist Shellee Colen “to describe the power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995, 3; citing Colen 1995). Some forms of women’s childbearing and parenting are valued and supported by legal, social,

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and medical institutions, while others are denigrated on the basis of age, class, race, sexual identity, nationality, immigrant status, disability, and other identity categories and life experiences. Providing a shorthand for this idea, feminist historian Rickie Solinger (2001) argues that “motherhood is a class privilege in America,” and emphasizes the close associations between race and class in the United States (see also Fernández Kelly 1992).2 While it is laudable to save a newborn’s life, safe haven laws ignore the real problem, which is that some women lack key social and economic supports enjoyed by most people in our society. Campaigns supporting safe haven laws target women who face disadvantages as likely bad mothers may encourage marginalized women and girls to relinquish custody of their babies. Healthy, “motherless” safe haven newborns are particularly valuable in the US adoption system, and adoptive parents praise women who use safe havens for selflessly allowing their child to join a deserving adoptive family. Issues surrounding baby safe haven laws and the targeting of certain kinds of women as potential bad mothers who should consider anonymously giving up their newborns are thus best understood as issues of reproductive justice. We should not view cases of relinquishment at safe havens or baby abandonment in less safe locations as individual choices made by individual women. Instead, we need to place newborn surrender within the context of the unequal support available to women and girls in this country and how we come to think about good mothers versus potentially bad mothers (see Biehl 2002/2003, Sanger 2006). This book expands on interdisciplinary scholarship that examines women’s reproductive lives and the cultural and historical construction of good/bad mother discourses. The feminist framework I use provides insight into the contested nature of what defines good and bad motherhood,3 and advances a reproductive justice approach to responding to the issues that surround unsafe infant abandonment.4 Feminist literature on motherhood does not deny that some mothers endanger, harm, or even kill their children. While knowing this, scholars call attention to the constricted nature of the good mother label that circulates in the US media and political, medical, and legal realms. As historians Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky write in “Bad Mothers”: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, “the label of ‘bad’ mother has been

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applied to far more women than those whose actions would warrant the name. By virtue of race, class, age, marital status, sexual orientation, dis/ ability, and numerous other factors, millions of American mothers have been deemed substandard” (1998, 2).5 Further, women’s reproductive decisions are under relentless public scrutiny and judged as symbols of social order or disorder by policymakers, government agencies, medical experts, and health care providers. Feminist scholars demonstrate how medical policies and experts insist that good mothers in the global North only give birth in hospitals and are attended by Western-trained doctors (Rothman 1991; MurphyLawless 1999; Martin 2001; Davis-Floyd 2003; Block 2008; Craven 2010; Bridges 2011; Gálvez 2011). In debates involving reproductive health policies, the charge of child abuse is a powerful moral discourse that has been applied to a range of women, including homebirthing women (Craven 2010); women who give birth unassisted (Tsing 1990); pregnant women who smoke, drink, or use drugs (Daniels 1996; Murphy and Rosenbaum 1998; Roberts 1999; Oaks 2001; Roth 2003; Golden 2006); and women who have abortions (Luker 1985; Simonds 1996; Ginsburg 1998). The bad mother label socially stigmatizes many mothers, and it is used to support legal charges that have serious consequences for some women. This volume contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on social definitions of motherhood in the United States by analyzing public discourses around baby safe haven laws to highlight how the concept of the good mother functions to maintain visibility of the specter that some women and girls—teenagers, low-income women, women of color, single women, immigrants, and others—are at high risk of unsafe newborn abandonment or infanticide. At the same time, ideals of motherhood as framed by discussions of safe havens influence all women, not only women who bear and raise children. In media representations of mothers, cautionary tales about bad mothers compete with images promoting what feminist scholars Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels term “the new momism”: “a set of ideals, norms, and practices, most frequently and powerfully represented in the media, that seem on the surface to celebrate motherhood, but which in reality promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond . . . reach” (2004, 5; see also Tsing 1990; Barnett 2006). Excessive standards for good mothers are connected to

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the way in which all mothers are positioned in our late capitalist system as single-handedly responsible for producing high quality babies (see Rothman 1993, 2005; Layne 1999, 2002; Rapp 1999; Solinger 2001; Taylor, Layne, and Wozniak 2004; Taylor 2008; Generations Ahead 2009, 2010; Gálvez 2011). For example, anthropologist Gail Landsman’s research on mothers raising children with disabilities demonstrates the expectations and blame that circulate within this logic: upon learning of their child’s disability, most mothers reflect on what they ate and did during pregnancy that caused the condition, internalizing the notion that pregnancy practices produced “damaged goods” (2000, 173; see also Landsman 1999; Rapp 1999; Generations Ahead 2009, 2010). A focus on women’s actions downplays both that genetic conditions are not controllable by individuals and establishes a narrow definition of what a high quality baby is. Caution about the pervasive judgment of individual women’s mothering practices, grounded in the argument that women can and should conform to model pregnancy and mothering ideals, is issued by LaddTaylor and Umanski: “In many ways, ‘bad’ mothers are not so very different from ‘good’ ones. We all struggle under mountains of conflicting advice that cannot possibly be followed in real life. We all must find our way in a society that devalues mothering, sees childrearing as a private family responsibility, and pays little heed to what actually happens to kids” (1998, 22). Although indeed all women are subject to messages about bad mothering, we need to carefully attend to how some women are viewed with greater scrutiny due to their race, age, class, marital status, nationality, or other socially marginalized identities. This book provides evidence for feminist legal scholar Carol Sanger’s contention that “Safe Haven laws work to encourage particular views about mothers. While the laws themselves are a standing reminder that some women kill newborns, their structure casts suspicion even on women who do not” (2006, 812). Building on critiques of the concept of individual choice and the social justice perspectives promoted by reproductive justice scholars and advocates, I emphasize that to frame women as individuals making good or bad choices by using safe havens or dumpsters fails to acknowledge the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences and the unequal social support available to women and girls within our society.

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The reproductive justice movement’s attention to a broad constellation of intersecting reproductive and social issues draws on activism by black and Chicana feminists starting in the 1960s that focused on social, medical, and economic constraints on the pregnancy and parenting decisions available to women of color (see Roberts 1999; Nelson 2003; Silliman et al. 2004; Price 2010; Luna 2011; Luna and Luker 2013). For example, they brought to visibility the systematic tubal ligation procedures performed on women of color and poor women without consent or with coerced consent (Gutiérrez 2008).6 The term reproductive justice was first put forward in 1994 during a black women’s caucus meeting held at a pro-choice conference in Illinois with the aim of connecting US and global women of color activism (see Price 2010, 47; Luna 2011, 227). In 1997 and 1998, with Ford Foundation funding, members of sixteen women of color organizations met to conduct the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Project (Ross et al. 2001, 81). SisterSong designed a research, education, and leadership program on reproductive tract infections, which are linked with infertility, using a human rights movement framework to improve the well-being of women of color by “addressing the human rights violations of poverty, homelessness, and inadequate health care” (Ross et al. 2001, 87). The collaboration shaped the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Women of color studies scholar Kimala Price captures how the reproductive justice movement’s focus explicitly is broader than that of mainstream pro-choice activism: “The movement’s three core values are: the right to have an abortion, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children” (2010, 43).7 Through a reproductive justice approach to making sense of the issues surrounding safe haven laws, the chapters that follow examine whether, how, and what sort of motherhood is celebrated and disparaged in baby safe haven media coverage and advocacy discourses, with particular attention to both abortion and adoption politics. In essence, this book argues that issues surrounding baby safe haven laws—and the laws themselves—are best understood as problems of reproductive justice, problems that call direct attention to the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences and the vast and persistent unequal social support available to women and girls within our society.

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Safe haven advocates have framed newborn abandonment—and the subsequent risk of death of innocent newborns—as a social problem demanding legitimation and remedy through government intervention. Unsafe infant abandonment also occurs in other countries, but the statebased safe haven legal approach in the United States stands alone. Since the mid-1990s, nonprofit and church-based organizations in eleven European countries, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, China, and South Africa set up what are called “baby boxes,” “baby hatches,” or “baby flaps,” incubators that are embedded in the wall of a hospital and connected to an alarm system (Bricker 2005; Japan Times 2007; Fong 2010; Gunaratnam 2010; Ramesh 2012; Szoboszlay 2012; McKirdy 2014). These efforts trace back to historical systems allowing the legal abandonment of infants. Although baby saving efforts are not limited to the United States, this book focuses on the US context to explore how discussions around the decriminalization of newborn relinquishment through safe haven laws reveal overlapping, highly emotive discourses about reproductive politics that circulate specifically in the United States. These complex discourses are not always visible in safe haven advocacy messages. What advocates have emphasized are specific cases of newborns found in public places, dead or alive, and the moral offensiveness of abandonment as a feature of US society. We do not know how many infants were abandoned prior to the institution of safe haven laws, nor do we know how many are abandoned now, because some are never found. There is no national system for tracking the number of infants surrendered at safe havens, although some counties and states compile data. Advocates and scholars repeatedly refer to estimates based on a review of media reports. A US Department of Health and Human Services (2001) study estimated that in 1998, one year before the first safe haven law, 105 infants were discarded in public locations across the United States;8 to put this in context, 3.94 million babies were born that year (Ventura et al. 2000). An unpublished follow-up report found that in 2006 there were 83 discarded infants (US Department of Health and Human Services 2010). Safe haven law proponents have argued with hyperbole that incidents of babies abandoned unsafely were far more numerous than this number, and at the same time have emphasized that the safe haven solution is appropriate even if it does not save all abandoned babies. A Missis-

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sippi county sheriff, for example, celebrated when a woman relinquished her newborn at a hospital emergency room safe haven, arguing, “there’s a story every other day of infants being left in trash cans . . . This one case has justified the law for the state of Mississippi” (Associated Press, 2001a). With this same message, an advocate of the first state safe haven law contended, “to me, it is a success whether we’ve saved 100 or one [baby]” (Austin 2004 in Iancu 2010, 94) and California’s spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services concluded, “if there is even one child that is not left in a trash can or bin, then we have accomplished our goal” (quoted in Clemings 2000). Safe haven advocates join other activists who have claimed that the magnitude of the social problem should not be measured by numbers. Sociologist Joel Best’s analysis of the 1980s missing-children movement in the United States points out that advocates of that social problem used the argument that “one missing child is too many” (1990, 50), which resonates with safe haven advocates’ strategy of legitimating laws with the claim that saving one infant is enough. To make clear both the explicit and underlying messages about responsible reproduction and motherhood connected to safe haven laws and to see directly how a reproductive justice framework provides a better approach to the issue of unplanned pregnancy, this book analyzes the dialogues, discourses, and debates that have framed safe havens and their use. Its focus is particularly on how these discourses make visible conceptions of good and bad mothers, what decisions they might make, and what the legal and social consequences should be for their actions. It examines how media, legislators, and safe haven advocates draw on social, religious, ethical, and political discourses to frame the meaning of a woman’s decision to relinquish her newborn as well as any responsibility for intervention by a state or other institution. The legal anonymity ensured by safe haven laws severely limits public acknowledgment of the social and political forces that influence the actual experiences and decision-making of girls and women who opt to use safe havens. Safe haven babies receive state resources through medical and foster/adoption care, whereas their mothers are freed from criminal scrutiny but also not supported with resources, such as postpartum medical care or family welfare support. There are few public narratives by women who have relinquished newborns at safe havens, revealing both stigma around safe haven relinquishment and a gap in

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our knowledge of exactly why some women see safe havens as their most feasible option. This invisibility is not surprising given the public silence around other reproductive decisions—most pointedly, the legal practice of abortion.9 Jeannie Ludlow, a feminist scholar and abortion care advocate who has assisted over 700 women, analyzes what women tell her in the clinic: Each of these women has shared a decision-making narrative during our screening process, and many retell those narratives to me while waiting to see the doctor or during their surgeries. Most of these narratives center around women’s struggles with the ordinary—and, simultaneously, monumental—details of life: managing family economics, negotiating work and child care, setting priorities, and planning for the future. (2008a, 29)

It is likely that the decision-making narratives of women and girls who relinquish newborns at safe haven sites feature some of these simultaneously ordinary and monumental life struggles. They also may include stories about abortion and adoption decision-making, concealed pregnancy, unattended birth, handling a newborn, and the act of using a safe haven site. Keeping these complexities in mind, throughout the book I use the terms “relinquish” and “surrender” to describe the act of leaving a baby at a safe haven site because both are used in public discourses. They are also terms common in adoption discourses. Historian and adoptive mother Barbara Melosh analyzes the language used to discuss adoption and argues that she prefers the term relinquishment because “it is a compelling expression of both the intentionality and the pain that attend this act” (2002, viii). Melosh notes that surrender is also a term “in disuse” in adoption circles that “poignantly expresses the loss of relinquishment, but I am uneasy with its connotations of war and defeat” (2002, viii), and I share that reservation. However, anthropologist Judith Modell’s interviews with birth mothers who had planned adoptions reveals that they spoke of “surrender,” and that the term “conveyed the coercion, the force of social pressure that made it impossible to decide anything else” (1994, 64). In line with a reproductive justice perspective, we need to be alert to whether this sense of coercive pressure is shared by women and girls who relinquish newborns at safe havens.

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In the absence of many women’s safe haven narratives, I draw on a range of sources that both reflect and shape public discourses about women’s reproductive lives: news stories about safe haven policy debates and the use of safe havens, advocacy organizations’ campaigns, and outreach programs educating people about safe haven laws.10 I have investigated advocacy organizations’ websites; media reports on safe haven policies and their use in local newspapers and the national press; and other media coverage, including Oprah’s talk show and YouTube videos, promoting safe havens. I direct particular attention to representations of motherhood based on women’s age, race, ethnicity, class, immigration status, and levels of mental health and social support. How are teenage girls and women framed in these sources as responsible or irresponsible reproductive decision-makers? How do these discourses account for the motherhood status of those women and girls who relinquish a baby at a safe haven and already have children? What are the consequences for safe haven advocates’ labeling some women and girls as at high risk for unsafe infant abandonment? What are the consequences of redefining the “good” mother as the mother who will surrender her status as a mother of a particular infant? Discourses surrounding safe haven laws are particularly instructive, because they demonstrate the intertwining of important political and social issues. These discourses figure the surrendering of an infant as linked to an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, which, in turn, links to policy controversies over infanticide, sexuality education, and access to contraception as well as to abortion rights and access to abortion services. Arguments for safe haven policies have routinely characterized women who have abandoned babies in public places as young, unmarried teenagers who concealed their pregnancies and gave birth alone and outside of a hospital. This stereotype raises the topics of sex outside of marriage, teenagers’ sexual activity, and young women’s abilities to give birth at-home or in public without support. Discussions about safe haven laws bring into view the possibility for a pregnancy to develop invisibly to a young woman’s family and community, thus opening discussion of the safety of unassisted births outside of hospitals. Access to legal, anonymous newborn relinquishment raises the possibility that a woman might be forced by family members or partners to take this action, which is connected to problems of violence against women in

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intimate relationships and a lack of family and community support. Safe haven discourses touch on how surrendering a newborn connects to problems of women’s mental and physical health during pregnancy, including postpartum depression or psychosis. Safe haven policies open up questions about the potential role of the surrendered baby’s father and the political issue of paternal rights. They necessarily connect with foster care and adoption policies and practices. These debates also intersect with overarching concerns about the role of government in support for pregnant and parenting women and their families; with the status of welfare systems and public health programs; and with how these programs can be and have been adapted for pregnant and parenting women, including those with particular needs, for example as teenagers, single, women or children with disabilities, women of color, and rural or urban residents. Arguments for safe haven laws entered a discursive gap that was created by the failure of reproductive and family policies to understand or adequately meet the needs of diverse women and girls. Safe haven advocates took action, garnered media attention, and pressed for state laws, simultaneously sidelining attention to the broad erosion of government support for diverse women’s reproductive decision-making.

Why Do We Need Safe Haven Laws? Advocacy for US Safe Haven Policies According to print media news accounts and advocacy group websites, journalists and grassroots activists were the first to suggest solutions to the incidence of abandoned newborns, and, in fact, advocacy in the United States aimed at reducing the number of abandoned babies preceded the 1999 Texas law. These organizations relied on a nonprofit set-up, with private funds supporting their activities. In San Antonio, Texas, Donna DeSoto, a Catholic woman and mother of three adopted children “driven by God’s will” and seen as having “an eccentric bent and unconventional ways,” appears to have founded the first organization specifically addressing newborn abandonment. DeSoto set up Sav Baby in 1991, providing a hotline and resources to “mothers in crisis,” and her work was inspired by dramatic experiences: adopting an abandoned baby, a near-death stroke and recovery during which God directed her to help single mothers and

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their babies, and a single tear running down the cheek of her four-yearold adopted son that dropped on a tiny casket while at the grave of an abandoned baby (Lewis 1998; Dorsett 2000; Stoeltje 2001; see also Danini 1998). Debbe Magnusen, mother of two who fostered over 30 drugexposed babies and adopted five of them, established Project Cuddle in Costa Mesa, California. Her work started in 1994 with a hotline, the organization’s website explains in the “About” section, “with the hope of ending baby abandonment”; the group continues to provide resources to pregnant women and facilitates adoptions (see also Magnusen 2001/2002). In 1996 another California mother, Debi Faris, was distressed by local cases of abandoned babies and aimed to educate people about how to prevent newborn deaths; she went on to become a strong advocate for California’s safe haven law (Whitaker 2000). Faris provides burials for abandoned infants in southern California and runs the nonprofit Garden of Angels Inc.-Safe Surrender for Newborns. On the other coast, New York-based Children of Hope in Long Island, established by Timothy Jaccard in 1998, also sponsors burials for abandoned infants and works to increase the visibility and use of safe haven laws, including coordinating New York state’s safe haven campaigns (Domash et al. 2010). Safe haven laws are built on a criminal justice framework that sets guidelines for how law enforcement officials will respond to individuals’ actions. This framing of how to address the problem elevated the significance and visibility of newborn abandonment from being an issue private citizens should address as a moral and social problem to one that state officials also should take legal action on. Promotion of the criminal justice approach is attributed to Jodi Brooks, an Alabama television reporter who covered local stories about women who abandoned or killed newborns. Mobile, Alabama District Attorney John Tyson established the program A Secret Safe Place for Babies in 1998 to connect hospitals, law enforcement, and state social services in order to offer legal immunity and confidentiality to women who safely surrendered newborns (see Sanger 2006, 774).11 Mobile’s program gained national attention, including coverage on the ABC show Good Morning America, a Harvard Innovations Award by the Kennedy School of Government, and discussion by state governments (see Sanger 2006, 775). Everyday citizens and institutional actors, including people representing the media, churches, and hospitals, saw the criminal justice ap-

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proach as the best model. In 2000, after a Cathedral of St. Paul member learned about the Mobile program from her husband, Minnesota advocates created A Safe Place for Newborns to lobby for a safe haven law and facilitate anonymous infant relinquishments at local hospitals; the program had the support of the state attorney general, the Minnesota County Attorneys Association, and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis (Marcotty 2000).12 In Tennessee, one mother shared with her friend a story on Alabama’s safe haven program in McCall Magazine’s May 2000 issue (Irwin 2000). They did not act right away, and blame themselves for the death of an infant left in a shed; the two lobbied for Tennessee’s 2001 safe haven law (Irwin 2000). As occurs with mobilization around other social problems (see Best 1990; Jacobson 1999; Nathanson 2009; Stavrianos 2015), safe haven legal discussions and media coverage increased the visibility of activists’ efforts and their claims that something must be done to fix the problem of unsafe baby abandonment.13 Criminal justice scholars who analyzed trends in national media coverage of infant abandonment conclude that “the problem of infant abandonment was a socially constructed perception rooted in moral panic,” and responded to by policymakers quickly and with a narrow focus on the outcome of saving vulnerable newborns without adequate attention to the circumstances leading to infant abandonment (Hammond, Miller, and Griffin 2010, 546). This moral-panic driven legislative pattern is found in other instances of child safety legislation, including the 1982 Missing Children Act (Best 1990), and, in subsequent decades, AMBER Alert laws to publicize child abductions, Megan’s Law to require sex offender registration, and Jessica’s Law to strengthen sentences for sexual abuse of minors (Hammond, Miller, and Griffin 2010, 548; see also Zgoba 2004). The question in each of these cases is whether a criminal justice approach was fitting for both defining and addressing the problem. States passed safe haven laws more rapidly than they passed any of these child protection laws, with 2001 being the most active year for legislative debate when 20 states approved safe haven laws. Otilia Iancu’s (2010) public policy dissertation examines the reasons that safe haven legislation diffused so quickly. She identifies key political features: the laws did not require funding, local cases of abandoned babies were used in the media and by legislators to make visible the problem that needed

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to be addressed, the policy solution did not “attack current laws” (public abandonment and infanticide remained illegal), legislative sponsors who were passionate about saving babies “correctly calculated” the views of their constituents, and sponsors were not afraid of political backlash or standing up to opposing arguments (Iancu 2010, 187–88; see also Appell 2002a). When we step back from these specific components of the political process, we see that a demand for healthy, adoptable newborns in the United States and a close fit with antiabortion discourses—as well as a refusal by politicians to confront socioeconomic and reproductive injustices—laid the foundation of these laws. And we broaden even further the safe haven discussion framework when we focus on the value of individual women’s reproductive experiences and not only the value of a safe haven newborn. This shift reveals the importance of both newborns and their mothers, which clarifies that attention to women’s well-being and reproductive justice is a better response than targeting some women and girls as potentially bad mothers and promoting the message that what is best is for them to relinquish their children. Reproductive justice advocates aim to build social, medical, and financial support for women who wish to raise children. Revealing the early safe haven-abortion politics link, the first state safe haven law was signed in 1999 by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, a Republican who held a strong antiabortion platform and supported government funding of faith-based social services, including crisis pregnancy centers focused on dissuading women from abortion. Political and social dynamics had motivated advocates to lobby for this law, labeled the Baby Moses law. The Texas safe haven advocates’ Baby Moses Project homepage states that the group selected this faith-based name drawing on the Biblical story they saw fitting, “because, in addition to being placed in a basket, Moses was also carefully watched over by an anonymous protector until he was safely placed in the arms of a person who could provide the love and care necessary for life.” Media stories and the bill’s advocates pointed to a series of infants unsafely abandoned in public in the Houston area during 1998 as the motivation for legislative action (see Iancu 2010, 87). A pediatrician for over three decades in Fort Worth, John Richardson, characterizing himself as “Catholic, pro-choice, pro-adoption, and totally apolitical,” contacted

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well-connected government officials to design a safe haven law after hearing about a safe haven program proposal in the state of Washington. Key players included his niece, Judge Deborah Richardson, and Republican Representative Geanie Morrison, who was a member of the House Juvenile Justice and Family Issues Committee (Richter 1999, cited in Iancu 2010, 87–88). After the Texas law was passed in 1999, 75 billboards were posted in Houston stating “Don’t Abandon Your Baby,” and radio and TV announcements further publicized the new law (Associated Press 1999). Texas debated its safe haven law in a context of severe punishments for crimes that caused a child death. Feminist sociologist Jeanne Flavin (2009) writes that Texas has particularly stringent criminal justice penalties for child death, revealing that a safe haven law with legal immunity for women who relinquished unharmed babies could do double-time work by both saving infants from harm and women from prison sentences. Throughout the early 1990s states had become more punitive in child death cases with some variation in state approaches; “Texas is known for imposing especially harsh sentences. Texas’s statute makes killing a child under the age of 6 a capital offence. Four of the nine women on Texas’s death row in October 2006 were convicted of crimes involving children” (Flavin 2009, 84). These efforts focus on punishment for child death, but not on prevention of it. Safe haven laws have focused on the well-being of newborns, yet other government decisions simultaneously tightened constraints on or eliminated support for mothers, particularly low-income single mothers. State measures to help pregnant and parenting women and their families were under particularly vehement attack in the period just before safe haven legislation was debated, in effect producing a population of marginalized mothers who would then be targeted as at risk for abandoning or abusing their newborns. Arguably, distressed new mothers were in greater need of stronger safety nets—for precisely the economic and social support being diminished or eliminated, which could have helped them to safely raise their babies, rather than safe haven laws encouraging them to relinquish their children. National welfare policies that were debated by legislators during the 1990s, and then passed with bipartisan support and public backing, specifically affected mothers and their children. The most significant and severe was the elimination of

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Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996 and new welfare-towork requirements for single mothers that held them to particular parenting practices (see Harris 1996; Solinger 2001; Mink 2002; Hancock 2004; McCormack 2005; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006; Morgen, Acker, and Weigt 2009; Edin and Kefalas 2011). Vitriolic public sentiment targeted poor mothers, framed as women of color, as “welfare queens” at the same time that expectations for poor mothers caring for their children were heightened, underscoring and exacerbating both race and class stratification (see Lubiano 1992; Hancock 2004; Bridges 2011). Child welfare policing reinforces normative and limited forms of family, as sociologist Jennifer Reich argues in her ethnographic study on families and the child welfare system in northern California: “The therapeutic state does not just demand compliance, but seeks to fix families in ways consistent with dominant beliefs about motherhood, fatherhood, and the appropriate form of family life” (2005, 26). The “deform” of welfare, as social justice activists refer to these policy changes, worked in tandem with the intensification at the national level of what Ladd-Taylor and Umansky call “political mother-blaming,” and welfare discourses situated mothers differently according to class status: “While more affluent women are ‘bad’ mothers if they do not stay at home, poor women are ‘bad’ mothers if they do” (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998, 17; see also Harris 1996; Connolly 2000; Hays 2004; McCormack 2005; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006). Within this social and political environment, safe haven advocates appeared to be encouraging women to make good choices about relinquishing their unwanted babies to save their lives instead of having more children than they could financially support, expecting government support for their children, committing infanticide, or having abortions. Anthropologists Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Caroline Sargent state that in the late 1990s, policymakers were faced with considering “alternatives for dealing with a projected increase in child abandonment in the United States resulting from the dismantling of child welfare supports” (1998, 20). Although I have not seen this claim explicitly in my research, its logic explains well the speed with which safe haven laws passed. Safe haven laws created a socially and legally acceptable outlet for newborns whose mothers, facing increasing constraints, might opt for. At this same time, access to legal abortion remained a bitterly contested political issue with underlying connections to safe haven ad-

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vocacy. Antiabortion activists’ successful lobbying has constrained women’s access to abortion care in the United States throughout the period following the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 (Luker 1985; Petchesky 1990; Joffe 1995, 2010; Ginsburg 1998; Solinger 1998; Munson 2009). In many regions of the United States today women must travel long distances to find abortion care providers; undergo consent procedures that may entail ultrasound, description of fetal development, pain, and heart tones; and endure the provision of misleading information about the risks of breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness following abortion. In 26 states, women face a waiting period of 18 to 72 hours between the time of counseling and the procedure itself (Guttmacher Institute 2012). Some women have had to cross antiabortion protest lines to enter abortion care clinics (see Henshaw 1995; Joffe 1995, 2010; Ginsburg 1998). Antiabortion advocates have succeeded in lobbying for legal control over surgical procedures, most starkly seen when a late-term abortion procedure was banned under federal law in 2003 when then-President George W. Bush approved the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. Abortion care providers are targeted with harassment, and antiabortion extremists have murdered doctors and clinic workers; a direct-action wing of the antiabortion movement condones and promotes this violence (Mason 2002; Munson 2009; Joffe 2010). Undergirding these antiabortion strategies, since the 1980s the fetus has gained medical and legal status accompanied by the creation of criminal penalties for pregnant women who commit fetal abuse. This represents an extension of the meaning of child abuse that emphasizes antiabortion advocates’ claims that the fetus is a child who deserves legal rights (see Murphy and Rosenbaum 1998; Morgan and Michaels 1999; Roberts 1999; Oaks 2001; Roth 2003; Golden 2006; Flavin 2009). Abortion, as a practice and a social movement issue, played a role that has not always been evident in safe haven policymaking and promotion. Feminist legal scholar Carol Sanger, writing in 2006, astutely argued that ultimately safe haven policies back the conservative drive “to protect the culture of life.” This phrase is shorthand for the Catholic Church’s opposition to “unnatural interventions” in human life “from conception to natural death,” language used repeatedly by President George W. Bush and other Republican political candidates in the 2000 presidential campaign (Morgan 2009, 236–37). Sanger contends,

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Safe Havens’ enduring achievement may not be infant rescue so much as the reinforcement of antiabortion sentiment, by connecting infanticide to abortion. Proponents claim variously that Safe Haven laws prevent abortion, that the need for the laws results from abortion, that abortion produces infanticide, and that abortion is infanticide. On this view, differences between the two practices are primarily in timing and not in kind. One may be legal and the other not, but the act—killing life—is the same. (2006, 809, emphasis in original)

Despite the divisive politics around abortion rights, the coming together of both sides—meaning both pro-/anti abortion rights and Democrat/Republican—is a part of the narrative about how many states were able to rapidly put in place safe haven policies, which discursively separate contested abortion politics from consensus on saving babies. Iancu demonstrates that the states legislating safe havens in the early phases were diverse by political leaning (Democrat/Republican), demographic characteristics, and economic status (2010, 15). Pro-choice and pro-life advocates took positions in part related to the specific legislators promoting the law and the arguments that accompanied their proposals. Support by these advocates for or against safe haven laws was also linked to emotional reactions to cases of infant abandonment in the media and the work of safe haven lobbying groups, with an overarching imperative to do something good for babies that also would feel good for a range of politicians. Even so, this promise did not hold enough appeal for all legislators, lobbyists, or abortion rights stakeholders. In Connecticut, Planned Parenthood stood against the safe haven proposal introduced by an antichoice legislator (see Dailard 2000, 2–3). The organization’s director of public affairs and communication explained, “whenever a baby is abandoned, we hear that the ‘abortion culture’ is promoting women to abandon their babies either before or after birth. . . . We felt that the bill would be ineffective, and we just didn’t want to get into the fray” (quoted in Dailard 2000, 3). But in North Carolina, a county Planned Parenthood organization supported a safe haven bill introduced by a pro-choice legislator working to emphasize women’s health, build bridges on either side of the aisle, and keep a focus on the prevention of unintended pregnancies (Dailard 2000, 3). Echoing the collaboration theme, Michigan Republican Sena-

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tor Shirley Johnson introduced safe haven legislation and recalled, “I can’t remember anybody eventually being in opposition but I do know that pro-choice organizations jumped right on board. It took a little while to get the pro-life people on board, but they eventually agreed that it was better than an abortion” (quoted in Iancu 2010, 233). Her Republican colleague Senator Patty Birkholz explained that support in Michigan was bipartisan, with contention along gender lines. She said, “I don’t mean to be sexist, but here in Michigan, the women legislators led the fight on that and it was bipartisan. Some of the males were initially quite supportive and some of them were not very supportive at all. I even had a couple say ‘well, you don’t want to promote promiscuity.’ And I was just so mad. I just let them have it” (quoted in Iancu 2010, 236). In this narrative, seemingly shared gender interests, narrowly defined, trumped female legislators’ differing political views. Other advocates framed safe haven legislation as devoid of political content, pointing to a goal of child safety motivated by caring about individual infants (and, rarely, their mothers). Former Democratic Colorado Senator Gloria Tanner, for example, stated, “it was really a nonpartisan type issue, [and] had nothing to do with party lines. I’m not even sure that it had anything to do with being conservative. I’m not conservative. It was people who cared about the safety of children” (quoted in Iancu 2010, 219). The background to the passage of Wyoming’s safe haven law, which faced opposition in the legislative process, supports this argument, with a poignant twist about a dying girl advocating to save babies (Fashek 2003). The sponsor of the bill, Republican Representative Clarene Law, named it Regan’s Safe Haven for Abandoned Newborns to honor the memory of the 10-year-old sister of one of her interns. Reportedly, Regan Marie Clark learned about legislation for abandoned newborns in other states while confined to her bed with cancer. Clark wanted to see a similar law enacted in Wyoming and rallied her fifth-grade class at Jackson Elementary to support her. . . . Law met with Clark, who died in May 2001, and took on the issue. Law still carries around some of the letters Clark’s classmates wrote to her about the bill . . . “Before she died, she wasn’t worried about dying,” wrote one student in pencil. “She was worried about dying babies.” (Fashek 2003)

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The implication is that if a young girl sees this issue as even more important than her own tragic impending death and rallies her classmates to advocate for it, opposition to the law lacks care. Reflecting this moral high ground position about the meaning of saving babies and children, “not one vote was cast against Safe Haven laws in at least ten states” (Sanger 2006, 773). Within two years, 34 states had approved safe haven laws; in the first four years of legislative activity, 90 percent of states (45) had passed them (Iancu 2010, 12).

Why We Do Not Need Safe Haven Laws: Critical Perspectives The swift adoption of safe haven laws evokes the process of instating state child abuse laws: in 1963 nine states had such laws, but by 1967 every state mandated that physicians report cases of suspected child abuse to authorities (Best 1990, 70; Iancu 2010, 5).14 Decades later, the link between the prevention of child abuse, neglect, or death and safe haven laws persisted at the symbolic level of national politics when states debated safe haven laws: “In April 2000, during Child Abuse Prevention Month, the US House of Representatives passed House Resolution 465 expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that local, state, and Federal governments should collect and disseminate statistics on the number of newborn babies abandoned in public places” (Iancu 2010, 7). The voice vote was symbolic because Federal House Resolution 4222, aimed at setting up the Baby Abandonment Task Force to systematically track cases and maintain a database, was introduced shortly thereafter and did not pass, falling short of safe haven advocates’ goals (see Williams-Mbengue 2001). A crucial aspect of this failure is explained by the fact that the vast majority of states did not appropriate any funding for generating or maintaining statistics on either illegally abandoned or legally relinquished babies.15 If cases cannot be tracked, it is not possible to measure the success of (or need for) safe haven laws. Emphasizing this situation, criminal justice scholars have argued that safe haven laws are a prime example of “crime control theater,” a process in which there is “a socially constructed solution to a socially constructed and rare— but nonetheless intractable—crime problem” (Hammond, Miller, and Griffin 2010). These analysts recognize that some newborns’ lives are

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protected through this legislation. But also they point out flaws in the law based on questions that we cannot know the answers to, including whether “women who take advantage of SHLs [safe haven laws] are the same women who would have otherwise committed infanticide”; paternity rights are abused; or “being relinquished to the state is in the best interest of every child that is abandoned at a safe haven location” (Hammond, Miller, and Griffin 2010, 551). The design of safe haven laws, with the safe haven relinquisher’s identity kept anonymous, impedes the expansion of our attention to the consequences of safe haven laws to include these considerations. The point for some critics of safe haven legislation is not that the goal—preventing unsafe infant abandonment—is unworthy, but rather that the laws do not acknowledge the circumstances that lead some to abandon their newborns or the ways in which safe haven legislation labels some women and girls as at risk for abandonment. For example, the Child Welfare League of America did not support safe haven legislation in 2000, a year when many states were considering it. Joyce Johnson, a spokeswoman for the league, argued that more information was needed about women’s decision-making before legal action should be taken: “What’s going on in the mind of someone who puts a baby in a Dumpster or throws their baby in the woods? . . . We don’t want to come off sounding as though we don’t care. We want to prevent it, but it leaves so many questions” (quoted in Whitaker 2000). This very problem of unanswered questions about the context of women’s decision-making echoes Hammond, Miller, and Griffin’s (2010) point about the incalculable shortcomings of safe haven laws. Safe haven laws are just one way to address the incidence of abandoned newborns. Taking women’s experiences as central, there are better ways to work toward reproductive and socioeconomic justice, and these need to be seen as the central issues to be confronted instead of focusing on potentially bad mothers, perceived to be those marginalized by social and economic injustices. Although legislative debates about whether or not to pass safe haven laws have now subsided, they do surface in some states when the law is up for reauthorization, and there is some ongoing opposition to the laws. The most vocal challenge addresses the problematic relationship between rare safe haven relinquishment and the routine practice of planned adoption. Planned adoptions provide the adoptee with documents about her

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or his family background, medical information, and birth information, and may include contact between the birth mother and child. Adoption rights advocates argue that safe haven laws promote an alternative adoption route that thwarts current practices. The main point of contention is that safe haven laws do not require from the relinquishing parent the same kind of identity information collected under planned adoption procedures. One umbrella adoption rights lobbying organization, Voice for Adoption, argued in 2000 as states debated safe haven laws, “adopted children fare better mentally if they have a sense of personal history” (quoted in Dailard 2000, 2). It claimed that safe haven laws are a setback because neither family history nor medical history is guaranteed to be reported by a person who relinquishes a baby at a safe haven.16 The radical adoptee advocacy group Bastard Nation has been particularly critical of US safe haven laws, which it has opposed unequivocally, punctuating its position by statements such as “Safe Haven laws need to be legally abandoned!” (Greiner 2003, emphasis in original). Bastard Nation cofounder Marley Greiner routinely refers to safe haven laws as “baby dump” laws, and in 2007 wrote the provocatively named Baby Dump News, a weekly e-chronicle, providing commentary on media and legal safe haven coverage. Greiner identifies the impetus for safe haven legislation as coming from Dr. William Pierce, a conservative adoption advocate. According to her, support for safe haven laws in large part has come from conservative and highly influential adoption lobbyists such as retired National Council for Adoption President and CEO Dr. William Pierce, who for over 20 years has opposed identity rights and records access for adult adoptees. It came as no surprise to us, then, when Dr. Pierce, complaining about “disappearing privacy rights in adoption” wrote last year that Safe Haven laws are a direct response to the successful movement to overturn outdated sealed records laws in the US. (Greiner 2003)17

For Greiner and others, safe haven laws are a primary component of fiercely fought legal contests over adoption rights that represent conservative laws and increase adoptees’ pain around a lack of self-identity knowledge. Recognizing the importance of identity, some states require the person who receives the baby at a safe haven site to hand

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out a medical or family background questionnaire to the relinquishing mother; however, she is not bound legally to fill it out. In characteristic Bastard Nation language, this sums up the adoption rights criticism: “Safe Haven laws, despite their good intent, are ultimately anti-adoptee, anti-adoption, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-family. They erase identities, deny the rights and due process of parents, and reject time-tested best practice” (Bastard Nation 2003). Arguments against safe haven laws on the basis that they deny adoptees’ access to their backgrounds highlight children’s rights issues both in the United States and internationally. A mainstream organization, the American Adoption Congress, states its opposition to safe haven laws on its website’s Abandoned Baby Statement page as stemming, in part, because, “all relinquished or abandoned children are entitled to the truth about themselves, including their birth histories, family medical histories, and social, ethnic and religious histories.” In Europe, programs in a number of countries face strong opposition based on the same rationale as well as the fact that anonymous newborn relinquishment runs counter to components of the 1989 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child. Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child mandates “registration of a child after birth, and rights to name, nationality, and ‘as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his parents’” (O’Donovan 2002, 351). Therefore, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child opposes so-called baby boxes, the heated incubators located at an exterior wall of a hospital where a baby can be left anonymously and an alarm sounded (Day 2012; Evans 2012; Meyer 2012; Paramaguru 2012; Ramesh 2012). In June 2012, news stories covered a study that found that 11 countries in Europe have baby boxes or hatches sponsored by nongovernmental organizations or religiously affiliated hospitals—Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, and Slovakia—totaling nearly 200 sites (Ramesh 2012; University of Nottingham 2012).18 Over 10 years, 400 babies were reportedly relinquished in these boxes (Meyer 2012). Szilvia Gyurkó, a UNICEF Hungary children’s rights legal expert, elaborates the UN’s opposition in broad terms, stating that a child’s rights are severely harmed in the case of baby box relinquishments, explaining: “He or she will never have a chance to know her/his birth mother, her/ his health history, or siblings” (quoted in Szoboszlay 2012).

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Despite the UN children’s rights policy, some UN member countries defend their practices. The Czech Republic, for example, has argued against the “request from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to close their boxes, pointing out that a special ministerial commission concluded that the system was in accordance with Czech law and saved lives” (Day 2012). Over 50 boxes are located in the Czech Republic, run by a nonstate organization. The founder asserts that the controversy “has been priceless media—I could never have afforded the advertising and have received a lot of support from people” (Meyer 2012). In Hungary, incubators attached to some hospitals were established beginning in 1996, but use of them was illegal until 2005 (Szoboszlay 2012). In fact, although the Committee on the Rights of the Child reviews countries’ compliance with the Convention, it does not have the power to enforce it; enforcement is only enacted through pressure on a country through international public opinion or through diplomatic channels (Kilbourne 2006). Feminist legal scholar Katherine O’Donovan (2002) analyzes how cultural, historical, and legal discourses in England, France, and Germany—all signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—support different newborn abandonment laws. Of these countries, only Germany has baby flaps (babyklappen), the first of which were set up in Hamburg in 1999 in response to the abandonment of four babies (O’Donovan 2002, 365). German law supports baby flaps, interpreting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child language “as far as possible” in article 7 as permitting anonymous baby relinquishment (O’Donovan 2002, 366). Demonstrating that drop-off programs are not the only approach to unwanted newborns, French and English laws offer alternative models. France allows a woman to give birth in a hospital anonymously, her name not appearing on the baby’s birth certificate; in place of her name, an X is recorded. Under English law secret abandonment is a crime, though in practice the system focuses on attempting to find and treat a woman who anonymously abandons her baby—the underlying assumption being that “a sane woman will not abandon her child” (O’Donovan 2002, 359). This diversity demonstrates that there is no one European approach to abandoned baby prevention efforts. The United States is one of three UN member states (along with Somalia and South Sudan) that has not ratified the Convention on the

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Rights of the Child, and thus does not need to defend state safe haven policies to the UN Committee.19 However, this does not mean that US laws are immune from the charge that they are in conflict with children’s rights laws. Safe haven laws do not follow the requirements of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), formulated against the historical backdrop of many Native American children having been removed from their homes and placed by missionaries in boarding schools or placed by child welfare workers in non-Indian families. These practices had significant practical and symbolic consequences for children, families, and tribes: “By 1968 more than one tribe had all of its children in outof-home placement, living with non-Indians” (Briggs 2012, 73, emphasis in original). The ICWA mandates that the first custody rights for Indian babies who are members of federally recognized tribes are with Native American families (National Indian Child Welfare Association 2012; Briggs 2012); there are over 500 such tribes (Stenzel 2009, 7).20 A Wisconsin lawyer who represents Indian tribes, Paul Stenzel, argues that “Safe Haven laws’ anonymity provisions strike at the heart of the ICWA” (2009, 4). Because family ethnic history does not need to be documented when a newborn is relinquished at a safe haven site, it is possible that Native American babies are placed in non-Indian homes. Safe haven laws also clash with the ICWA because that law stipulates that Indian parental rights cannot be terminated before a newborn is 10 days old and tribes have the right to participate in custody proceedings involving a Native American baby (Stenzel 2009, 1). Language recognizing the ICWA mandate is included in the safe haven laws of four states (Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wisconsin). In practice, however, individuals who relinquish babies remain anonymous and are not required to disclose any aspects of their identity, including tribal affiliation (Stenzel 2009, 3). The arguments of safe haven critics in the United States also center on the issue of rights of the relinquished newborn’s father. Lawyer and father’s rights advocate Jeffrey Leving (2011) sums up the arguments: The irony in the “safe haven” laws lies with continued gender bias that surrounds the rights of fathers. When a father chooses to opt out of parenthood and just walk away from his paternal responsibilities, he be-

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comes a “deadbeat dad” or worse, he goes to jail for failing to live up to his financial responsibilities. Yet, when a mother decides that she will not take care of her child, she is given anywhere from 78 hours to 18 years, in some states [these timeframes have changed], to “safely” abandon her child. Unlike a traditional adoption, the father does not have to be notified, does not have to legally relinquish his parental rights, and the child is denied a chance to grow up with dad or members of his biological family.

State laws vary regarding whether and how the relinquished newborn’s father will be sought after or given the opportunity to come forward, and some states mandate a search of putative father lists or the posting of public notices that could alert a father who suspects his newborn was relinquished.21 Adoption law specialist Joan Hollinger addresses further the symbolic side of safe haven laws’ focus on mothers’ rights to relinquish a newborn without adequate protection for fathers’ rights, stating that “it is inappropriate . . . to fuel the stereotype that fathers— particularly unmarried fathers—are going to be absent and want nothing to do with their baby” (quoted in Dailard 2000, 2; see Edin and Nelson 2013). Thus fathers’ rights in relation to safe haven laws pertain both to individual men’s rights and to legal and social representations of fatherhood in general. Taking a different approach, women’s health advocates have voiced specific criticisms of safe haven laws that positioned the laws as a stopgap measure as not going far enough, and as treating a small part of the problem of abandoned newborns to avoid addressing the whole problem of support for pregnant women and new mothers. Some argued that the laws’ efforts to protect women’s legal rights to anonymity would work to prevent women from obtaining counseling and health care that they may need. Mary Lee Allen, director of the child welfare and mental health division of the Children’s Defense Fund, stated, “these laws help women to drop their babies off but do nothing to provide supports to women and children before this happens. We need to use the interest and new alliances that have formed around these laws to build those supports” (quoted in Dailard 2000, 11; see also Biehl 2002/2003). A related argument notes the failure to account for women’s lives and health and places fault at the feet of legal authorities: “Increasingly, the

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state acts as if it has the obligation to intervene in women’s reproductive lives, while absolving itself of any responsibility for ensuring that the basic needs for health care (including drug treatment), education, housing, and financial support are met” (Flavin 2009, 186). For example, the strong imperative to make use of a safe haven site is made clear in one district attorney’s announcement that “on the one hand we promise confidentiality and no prosecution . . . On the other hand, if you injure your child, if you throw it into a Dumpster, we’re going to prosecute you every way we can” (Mobile County Alabama district attorney John Tyson, Jr., quoted in Whitaker 2000, A2). No one would argue that child abuse or tossing a newborn in a dumpster is an acceptable act; however, these comments express a certain vindictiveness and do not pay attention to the distress or needs of a woman who is coping with a crisis about raising a newborn. Critical concerns about women’s well-being in the contexts of their lives and communities are advanced by reproductive justice advocates, providing an analytic and practical framework for understanding and working for broad scale social change. As defined on the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice website, the reproductive justice approach holds “that all individuals are part of families and communities and that our strategies must lift up entire communities in order to support individuals” (see also Silliman et al. 2004; Ehrenreich 2008; Price 2010; Luna 2011; Chrisler 2012; Luna and Luker 2013).22 The reproductive justice framework recognizes women as decision-makers and equally addresses the social inequalities that influence women’s decisions. Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (2005) argues, Women’s ability to exercise self-determination—including in their reproductive lives—is impacted by power inequities inherent in our society’s institutions, environment, economics, and culture. The analysis of the problems, strategies and envisioned solutions must be comprehensive and focus on a host of interconnecting social justice and human rights issues that affect women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction. (2005, 2)

In line with this book’s arguments, this perspective emphasizes that the focus on saving babies does not confront the circumstances that lead girls and women to relinquish infants at safe havens. Safe haven

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proponents also fail to challenge, and indeed underwrite, the power inequities involved in women’s and girls’ consent to sex, their access to nonjudgmental sexuality and reproductive health services—including contraception, abortion, and adoption—and social support and parenting resources. As Sanger (2006) points out, abstinence-only sex education and stigma around teen pregnancy itself may contribute to girls feeling that they must conceal their pregnancies and subsequently drive their need to use safe haven laws. Further, the saving babies measurement of state safe haven laws’ success is too limited. The work that safe haven advocacy does is interconnected with symbolic and practical abortion and adoption politics, sidelines calls for the provision of medical care and social support for pregnant and postpartum women, and creates a dumpster/bad versus safe haven/good binary that simplifies the options women have for unwanted pregnancies.

The Cultural Components of Wanted and Unwanted Motherhood The range of global and historical approaches to dealing with infant abandonment offers examples of what feminist anthropologists Lynn Morgan and Elizabeth Roberts (2012) identify as “reproductive governance” practices. They argue that scholars should attend to how “state institutions, churches, donor agencies, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs)” use a range of strategies, including “legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor and control reproductive behaviours and practices” (2012, 243). In the case of infant abandonment, these actors mobilized varied responses to the problem. However, this is not to say that women themselves were directly controlled by reproductive governance practices. Historian Rachel Fuchs reminds us that “women have always had methods of coping with unwelcome babies” (1984, 62). She and other historians, anthropologists, and demographers document the broad contexts within which women have done so, revealing variation by culture and shifts over time in the social acceptability of child relinquishment (Fuchs 1992; Kertzer 1994; Roberts 1999; Broder 2002; Kramar 2005; Sanger 2006; Flavin 2009). Scholars seek to understand what has compelled some women to abandon an infant, put a newborn

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up for adoption, or even commit infanticide, practices that work against the assumption that all women naturally love their newborns and will act in their newborn’s best interest. Because safe haven discourses frame newborn relinquishment as a way to express maternal love, we must consider carefully this assumption.

Maternal Love Current Western cultural expectations maintain that maternal love is a core characteristic of motherhood. As stated by feminist sociologist Judith Lorber, “the current construction of motherhood in Western cultures claims that women naturally feel unconditional love for their children and want to nurture them, especially when they are babies” (1994, 167–68). However, extensive historical and cross-cultural evidence demonstrates that maternal love and child caretaking are not, and have not always been, connected in this way (see Rich 1976; Badinter 1981; Ruddick 1989; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Lorber 1994; Zelizer 1994; DeLoache and Gottlieb 2000; Cook 2004; Gottlieb 2004). Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes emphasizes this point, stating that “mother love is anything other than natural and instead represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments, and practices that are everywhere socially and culturally produced” (1992, 341, emphasis in original). Elisabeth Badinter’s Mother Love: Myth and Reality (1981, 39–52), reveals that in the past it was preferable to French upper-class women to hire wetnurses to care for their children, and only in the late eighteenth century did philosophers and economists campaign for these women to care for and feed their own children to uphold the idea that children were valuable as future French citizens and workers. Lorber, drawing on Badinter, notes, “it took many years before the concept of mother love as natural, spontaneous, and central to womanhood became generally accepted by French women” (1994, 146). We should not assume that this shift represents progress that led worldwide to a universally held tie between womanhood and motherhood, and need to instead consider how ideas about maternal nature and proper mothers are socially constructed in particular historical times and cultural places. Some diverse examples illustrate this point. Lorber cites evidence that in nineteenth-century rural Bavaria ser-

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vants routinely denied both pregnancy and giving birth, doing so alone in “privies” and returning to work immediately (1994, 147). Enslaved women in the United States were required to reproduce to sustain slavery and to work when pregnant. Their children legally belonged to their owners, and women’s love for their children was not acknowledged by slave owners: “Becoming a mother did not change her primary task, which was physical labor for her master” (Roberts 1999, 36; see also Briggs 2012, 49). Demonstrating one example of the relationship between enslaved women and their children under these conditions, black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts argues that “infanticide was the most extreme form of slave mothers’ resistance” to this system (1999, 48). In other words, causing the death of one’s child was a most painful form of maternal protection: the child was better off dead than suffering enslavement. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s ethnographic study of mother– child relationships in an impoverished shantytown in northeastern Brazil in the 1960s and 1980s analyzes the “customary practice of selective neglect” (1992, 357) of weak infants, those deemed born “wanting to die” (315), in an area with severely scarce resources that could not sustain all babies. Scheper-Hughes’s work makes clear that moral judgments were not made about maternal neglect, and indeed, her impulse to use Western medicine to try to save babies was looked upon by the Brazilian women as futile. She demonstrates that views of maternal love and the value of babies are shaped within specific conditions. Indeed, starting in the 1970s in the United States and other places and inspired by the women’s liberation movement, feminist scholars and activists exposed Western assumptions about the innate connection between womanhood, motherhood, and maternal love as inadequate to women’s experiences. Lesbian feminist writer and poet Adrienne Rich’s classic Of Woman Born (1976) analyzes why she “was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is ‘unconditional’” (23) and frames motherhood in two ways. First, motherhood is an experience between a woman, “her reproductive powers,” and her children, and second, it is an institution that supports patriarchy through social, political, and economic practices and expectations (13). The field of motherhood studies, which coalesced in the mid-1990s, examines these components of motherhood along with attention to the identity and subjectivity of motherhood (O’Reilly 2010a, 2010b). That there is a diversity of socially

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acceptable ways of experiencing and theorizing motherhood may seem unremarkable from today’s standpoint. Feminist sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman’s summary of “the old definitions [that] saw motherhood as a status” helps situate how motherhood was seen in the pre-1970s era when Rich’s writing challenged it: Women were mothers. Mothering was not something women did, it was something women were . . . Motherhood was in fact a master status, and everything women did was seen in terms of our motherhood, or our potential for motherhood. Motherhood and its demands, babies and children and their demands, defined women. We had to be what they needed. (1989, 22–23, emphasis in original)

Safe haven laws offer women and girls the opportunity to relinquish motherhood anonymously in an act that reveals some women’s acquiescence to high expectations of what a mother does and is. Symbolically, through a safe haven relinquishment a woman is admitting that someone else will be a better mother. Although it sounds contradictory, safe haven advocates praise women for relying on their maternal nature to choose not to mother. This discourse is also used in pro-adoption circles, in which birth mothers are said to demonstrate “a higher and less selfish form of love” when they follow an adoption plan (Joyce 2013, 115). In this view, a woman who relinquishes her infant goes against her maternal nature because she does not raise her baby, but also she relies on her maternal nature to care about her baby’s future.

Infant Abandonment The meaning of “abandonment” and interventions to assist abandoned children are grounded in specific historical times with a range of cultural meanings. Anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick argues that the “classic case of children abandoned by parents is ‘exposure’ of babies to the elements for rescue” (2000, 3). Historian John Boswell’s The Kindness of Strangers (1988) demonstrates that in Europe, previous to the thirteenthcentury establishment of “foundling homes,” abandoned babies were cared for by strangers and sometimes reclaimed by their families (see Sá 2000, 28).23 Hospitals and churches became sites of institutional

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abandonment that was legal and anonymous, and in southern Europe socially acceptable abandonment sites included “the baptismal font in the cathedral, the doorstep of a person in charge of distributing abandoned children to wet-nurses, the entrance of the hospital, or a basket placed in the neighbourhood of the hospital and hidden from general view” (Sá 2000, 30). In France acceptability of legal abandonment waxed and waned, beginning in the twelfth century, with the church and state taking responsibility in different historical time periods. During the French Revolution, the state assumed care for abandoned and foundling children, and the decree of 1811 mandated that all hospices for abandoned children have tours, baby boxes located in an exterior wall with a way to swivel the cradle into the hospice, allowing anonymous child surrender (Fuchs 1984, 21–23). Some babies arrived with letters or notes, for example, explaining, “necessity made me do it” (Fuchs 1984, 95). Badinter argues that this practice indicates that “it is not without emotion and probably with guilt that mothers throughout the ages have fastened notes to their babies’ swaddling clothes” (1981, 40). The emphasis on evidence showing that many mothers were forced to abandon their babies against their will and suffered emotionally even in the context of widespread, socially condoned, and economically driven abandonment practices maintains an ideal of maternal love as natural. Demographic anthropologist David Kertzer writes that the spread of foundling institutions from Italy first to France, Spain, and Portugal grew to Ireland, Poland, Austria, and Russia by the start of the nineteenth century, with over 100,000 babies annually abandoned in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century (Kertzer 2000, 41). Historian Rachel Fuchs found that in the first half of the nineteenth century “as many as one-fourth of all newborn babies and half of all illegitimate newborn babies in Paris were abandoned each year” to be cared for at the Paris, state-run foundling home (1984, xi–xii; 77). Throughout Europe, religious institutions shaped a Catholic system and a Protestant system for treating unwed mothers and foundlings. The former focuses on forgiveness, recovering the honor of the unwed mother and saving the baby’s soul, while the latter stresses individual responsibility and “paying the price” for one’s actions (Kertzer 1994, 17). Kertzer argues that the enormous rise in abandoned babies in nineteenth-century Italy—where wild roaming dogs in urban areas and pigs in farming fields represented

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major threats to abandoned babies (104)—was rooted in a simple fact: “Illegitimate babies were abandoned because society made it difficult for their mothers to raise them” (18).24 The Catholic Church’s drive to enforce strict teachings on sexual morality meant that “the sight of children living with their unwed mothers became an affront to public morality” (19). Child advocates proposed institutional solutions to these moralsocial problems: “If the abandonment of babies in fields, alleys, and roads—the practice for millennia in Europe—was to be stopped, some way had to be found for mothers to abandon their newborns so that the babies would immediately receive care and the women would remain anonymous” (Kertzer 1994, 104). This is not the only option, of course, and lifting social-religious prohibitions on illegitimacy also could have decreased infant abandonments. Further, we should not assume that foundling asylums were the best way to rescue abandoned infants. Mortality rates for infants in foundling homes in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were so high that some referred to them as “highly effective agencies of infanticide” (Brettell 1998, 168; see also Fuchs 1984). European ideologies spread to the United States in the nineteenth century and were modified to address the epidemic of infant abandonment in urban centers, particularly New York City (Miller 2008, 238). Historian Julie Miller notes that poor immigrants filled New York slums, and “during the antebellum years, its streets and stoops began to fill with foundlings” (2008, 5). New York sponsored more asylums for foundlings than any other US city, spurred on, in part, by media watchdogs: “The press, too, was a factor in the creation, and the operation, of the foundling asylums, judging, prodding, shedding sentimental tears, and always watching” (5). Between 1880 and 1885, the largest asylums together received over 2,000 babies annually (226–27), and “a foundling was named for nearly every downtown corner” (227). A missionary and author, Helen Campbell, secretly observed one scene of a woman relinquishing a baby in a large wicker cradle placed at the entrance of the Catholic-run New York Foundling Asylum: With a burst of tears she laid it in the basket and silently hurried down the steps. Crouching again in the friendly shadow she waited, her face

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turned toward the door-way, till a baby’s wail followed by a sharp little cry was heard, and she half sprung up and stretched her arms toward the basket. The door opened even as the cry came. A woman with a calm gentle face stood for a moment, the flood of light from the hall bringing out every line of her face and figure, then stooped and lifted the bundle to her shoulder, pressing the little face close to her own. The baby nestled to her as she passed into the hall; the door closed, and the woman crouching in the darkness, stole away, bearing her secret with her. (quoted in Miller 2008, 137)

This narrative creates sympathy for the responsible, heartbroken mother who waits to ensure that her baby is saved, spiritually and physically. Embedded in this portrait is the assumption that maternal love is felt by the mother, yet that due to circumstances, that love could only be expressed by the mother abandoning her infant. The asylum does not exist today, and in the United States the state, rather than religious organizations, holds control over the solution to cases of abandoned babies. However, we see in both historical moments, separated by over a century, the assumptions that some mothers opt to relinquish their newborns even though they love them and that care should be provided to babies, yet not to distressed mothers. The secrecy involved in the asylum surrender mirrors the no-questions-asked assurance in safe haven laws, leaving women to cope with the stigma of having relinquished a newborn without any trace.

Adoption Infant abandonment can also be prevented through planned adoptions, and the social acceptability and politics around the promotion of adoption in the United States has changed over time. A specific practice that existed from the late 1940s through the 1960s calls attention to how the link between motherhood and maternal love has not always meant that babies are considered to be naturally best off with their biological mothers. The post-World War II time period featured strict cultural expectations around motherhood as being linked only to marriage, and young women’s pregnancies out of wedlock represented a middle-class white crisis. In the decades before the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade, which

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legalized abortion in limited circumstances, an estimated 1.5 million middle-class, young, unwed, primarily white women who became pregnant were placed in maternity homes by their families and relinquished their newborns (see Fessler 2006; Joyce 2013, 89).25 These young women were told that they had absolutely no socially acceptable or financial choice but to give their newborns to a deserving adoptive couple and to live their lives as if they were not birth mothers (Solinger, 2000, 2001; Fessler 2006). Adoption became seen as a more viable option for creating a family, and nonfamily adoptions rose dramatically, from 8,000 per year in 1937 to 70,000 in 1965 (Fessler 2006, 183). Middle-class unmarried pregnant white women were expected to give birth, and then, overcoming natural maternal love, they were required to relinquish their newborns with the understanding that they would forget about them and never see them again.26 These same birth mothers were expected to return to participate in middle-class culture unmarked by their unwed pregnancy and prepared to raise their own children in their married futures, enacting the social ideal of womanhood. In the post-World War II era there was a national obsession with reproduction, connected to broader politics. Historian Elaine Tyler May states that “with the onset of the cold war, the family surfaced as the ideological center of national culture, while public and community life declined” (1995, 18). Married white women were socialized to give birth and raise babies, and as couples facing infertility turned to adoption to complete their nuclear families, “adoption agencies became brokerage houses for childless couples” (May 1995, 142–43). The message that infertile white couples should become parents and adopt a baby that “looked like them” to form a “natural” family (Herman 2008) coincided with pressures on single white women to relinquish their babies.27 Simultaneously, concerns about a white baby shortage (Zelizer 1994; May 1995) fueled what Solinger calls the “postwar White adoption mandate” (2000). Young single white women relinquished babies for adoption at a rate ten times higher than black women (Fessler 2006, 108), reflecting cultural-political considerations, including differential family pressures, treatment by adoption agencies, and social views on illegitimacy and race (see Kunzel 1993; Dubinsky 2010; Briggs 2012). A mother of a pregnant single black teenager remarked, “it would be immoral to place the

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baby [for adoption]. That would be throwing away your own flesh and blood” (quoted in Solinger 2000, 6). White women recall the extreme pressure they faced in the 1960s, both from family members and others. One explained that when she was pregnant at age 16, the only option that was handed to me, oh yeah, mom said, “well, we’ll get you to a home for unwed mothers far, far away.” And I said, . . . “I want to go downtown, there must be some kind of social worker that can help me keep my baby.” And mom said, “I don’t want anybody in this state to find out . . . we’ll find a nice home for unwed mothers down south somewhere.” (Modell 1994, 66)

Another woman remembered that during her time in a 1960s maternity home, “the staff were very condescending and very judgmental. They would say, ‘Your child will be better off without you. You’re doing the right thing. There’s a loving family out there.’ And I was thinking, ‘well, how come I can’t be a loving mother?’” (Fessler 2006, 118). A birth mother who surrendered her baby in the 1960s recalls being given this same message by a social worker who pointedly said, “you have to give her to two parents. If you love her, you’ll give her up. You want to do what’s best for the child. It’s selfish for you to keep her, for even thinking about keeping her, because what can you provide for her?” (Modell 1994, 81). Parenting support for white middle-class single mothers in this period who wanted to raise their children was largely unavailable, and women’s feelings could not offset these cultural adoption pressures. This lack of support for women who are seen as potentially bad mothers due to their identities or circumstances continues today. Revealing shifts in social definitions about who is a good mother, white single middle-class mothers today are not labeled as bad mothers as a general group, but a range of other populations of women are deemed automatically unworthy of motherhood. Just as in the previous era when saving foundlings’ bodies and souls was a concerted effort, religious-based institutions played significant roles in emphasizing adoption as the solution to white women’s unwed pregnancy problem. The network of maternity homes expanded following World War II, and between 1945 and 1965 over two-thirds of

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the 200 licensed homes were run by the Florence Crittendon Association of America, Catholic Charities, and the Salvation Army (Solinger 2000, 103–04). These homes moved away from former punitive models of maternity home care, in which women were reformed and saved, to instead emphasize individual transformation and practices “conducive to changes of heart, mind, and persona” (Solinger 2000, 106). Birth mothers were supposed to erase the experience of relinquishing a newborn and instructed not to mourn the event. In the words of a woman remembering the message she received: “You’ll forget. You’ll close this chapter in your life. You’ll do all these wonderful things. This is not the end, it is the beginning” (Modell 1994, 85). The idea that a woman can secretly experience pregnancy, birth, and the surrender of her newborn without social, emotional, or even spiritual support—which was so painful for many women in the maternity home system—is embedded in safe haven laws today. Going one step further, in fact, safe haven laws do not focus on providing even basic medical care for women who have given birth alone.28 The model woman who relinquishes a newborn at a safe haven is represented as silent, never expressing her own needs or desires. From today’s vantage point it may be hard to think of adoption as coercive or as such a severe break between a birth mother and her baby’s adoptive family, involving little to no information (or incorrect information) shared between the two parties and brokered by adoption institutions that matched babies and adoptive parents (see Patton 2000; Melosh 2002; Herman 2008; Lifton 2009).29 Adoption records were sealed, and “having relinquished a child, the birthparent was supposed to keep that parental role hidden” (Modell 2002, 25). Open adoption—in which the birth mother and adoptive parents have some form of contact—did not become a standard practice until the 1980s (see Siegel 2006). Past decades of secrecy about unwed pregnancy and adoption promoted a narrative about all adoptive babies being unwanted by their birth mothers: Social acceptance [of adoption] was predicated on the idea that these babies were unwanted. This belief eliminated a potential moral dilemma, especially for adoptive families: most couples, no matter how much they wanted a child, would not want to be involved in taking a child away from

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a mother against her will. But given the secrecy and the social stigma of the time, adoptive parents were never exposed to the story of the pain and grief felt by so many of the mothers. (Fessler 2006, 183)

Uncovering the complexities of birth mothers’ feelings about having had to hide their pregnancies and live as if they had never given birth, starting in the 1970s, a vocal component of the adoption rights movement encouraged adoptees to search for their birth mothers and birth mothers organized together to search for their children (see Modell 1994, 2002; Carp 1998, 2004; Lifton 2009). At a time of social upheaval and movements related to identity-based rights—as seen in arguments for civil, gay and lesbian, and women’s rights—adoptees argued that they needed to have the right to knowledge of their identities (Carp 1998, 142–43). Women began to talk about their experiences of surrendering infants within a consciousness-raising model, and in 1976 a Boston collective formed to organize Concerned United Birthparents (CUB) (see Modell 1994, 2002; Carp 1998; Solinger 2001). The organization flourished, and CUB members met in locations across the country (38 in 1981). It also supported searches by birth mothers who wanted to contact their surrendered children and lobbied for open adoption records, later also advocating open adoption policies (Carp 1998, 204–07). Although the philosophy of both social movement groups—those for adoptee rights and those for birth mother rights—was that it was healthy for adoptees and birth mothers to make contact, not all reunions resulted in ongoing relationships, and some meetings were very painful (see Jones 1993; Modell 1994; Lifton 2009). At the broadest level, by making visible the experiences of birth mothers, these movements promoted a shift in social views about adoption and worked to lessen the secrecy and stigma associated with it.

Infanticide Whereas adoption has become a socially acceptable option for birth mothers, infanticide as a way to cope with an unwanted or untenable birth remains highly stigmatized and, in most places, criminalized. But infanticide and newborn neglect is found throughout history and in diverse cultures (see Miller 1987; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Picone 1998;

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Meyer and Oberman 2001; Drescher-Burke, Krall, and Penick, 2004; Gottlieb 2004, 223–37; Kramar 2005; Gheorghe et al. 2011; Rattigan 2012). The reasons theorized to explain neonaticide (killing of a baby under one month old) include cultural, social, health, and religious rationales—“poverty, overpopulation, laws governing inheritance, customs relating to nonmarital children, religious or superstitious beliefs regarding disability, eugenics, and maternal madness” (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 1). Considering the wide range of meanings associated with newborn death, some anthropologists question the applicability of the Western terms “neglect” and “infanticide” to all societies (see ScheperHughes 1992). In line with a broader framing of neonaticide, anthropologist Caroline Brettel challenges scholars to “consider seriously and critically whether women who are drawn away from tending to their newborn infants by work that is necessary to the survival of their family are indeed guilty of child neglect” (1998, 180). This perspective applies to thinking about the social structures that shape the conditions of motherhood for women and their families, and is even relevant to the United States today as seen in work requirements placed on single mothers receiving welfare that draw them out of the home and result in children being left unsupervised or with inadequate childcare (see Harris 1996; Connolly 2000; Gauthier, Chaudoir, and Forsyth 2003; Hays 2004; McCormack 2005; Marchevsky and Theoharis 2006). In this view, the decision to abandon an infant is a marker of a woman’s social and economic marginalization, not an individual failing of maternal nature. Writing about a different time and place, Fuchs provides evidence for the severe tension between work and motherhood in the context of nineteenth-century France, and she argues further that women’s own survival was at stake: “Abandonment of an infant for single, working women should not be taken as evidence for lack of maternal love . . . their wages barely covered the meager necessities for themselves, let alone the additional expense of a child . . . abandonment was the preferred alternative to keeping the babies and watching them die of starvation” (1984, 114–15). Fuchs shows that infant abandonments declined with the rise of social welfare, indicating that economic support expands a woman’s option to include raise her child with adequate means, a point that is too easily overlooked in current welfare policy debates (116).

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Of course, the documented ubiquitous and complex nature of infanticide does not necessarily mean legal acceptance of it. Different philosophies guide how societies understand infanticide and how governments create legal consequences for child death. Two dominant ideas came into being in the late nineteenth century when French psychiatrists theorized that maternal mental illness was linked to infanticide. This framework supports legal policy in at least 23 countries, beginning with England’s 1922 and 1938 infanticide laws (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 11). This “mental illness” legal model contends that “mothers who can show that they suffered from a postpartum mental disorder generally are charged with manslaughter, rather than murder, and the vast majority of such defendants receive probationary sentences and healthcare interventions rather than prison sentences” (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 11). Despite the fact that Canada and England, societies arguably quite similar to the United States, have used this mental health approach to infanticide cases, the United States has framed infanticide as a crime requiring legal penalty. Further, in the absence of a national US infanticide law, “women who commit similar offenses are tried and sentenced in wildly disparate ways depending on the predilections of local prosecutors, judges, and juries” (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 172; see also Appell 2002b). Clinical psychiatry professor Margaret Spinelli’s study of postpartum psychosis defenses in American infanticide court cases finds that the UK system of mental health treatment is a better strategy to prevent infanticide than the US incarceration system: “After 80 years of using probation and treatment in lieu of incarceration, the British legal system has demonstrated that this approach is as effective as incarceration in preventing or deterring infanticide, while being considerably more efficient and cost-effective” (2004, 1553). The criminal justice intervention offered by US safe haven laws to allow legal immunity to the biological mother emphasizes that the solution to the problem is seen as set within the legal realm, not the mental health or social services realm. But Spinelli’s call to redesign US frameworks for infanticide runs against prevailing and powerful ideas in North America about women as responsible decision-makers and cultural trends that focus on elevating the status of the fetus as well as connecting abortion with infanticide (see Sanger 2006). For example, Canada’s infanticide laws have shifted over time away from the mental health model, and at the start of the

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twenty-first century sentencing became more strict (Kramar 2005). Sociologist Kirsten Kramar demonstrates in her historical study that the law over time has reframed women from being victims of socioeconomic disadvantage or of their mental health state to being aggressors against an “infant-victim” (2005, 16). She identifies this shift as a reaction to the rise of antiabortion activism that focused on gaining rights for the fetus and the elision of the issues of abortion and infanticide in order to define the acts as having equal moral weight. My analysis of the messages that underlie safe haven advocacy is closely informed by feminist legal scholar Carol Sanger’s insights on safe haven laws as connected to the cultural politics surrounding abortion debates: While their explicit purpose is to save infants from dumpsters, their rhetorical effect encompasses lifesaving as that term is understood within the culture of life: the salvation of unborn life. Safe Havens’ more enduring and subtle achievement is therefore less criminological than cultural: the vindication and further extension into public consciousness of the view that abortion is murder. (Sanger 2006, 829)

Seeking to document what happens beyond the symbolic realm, social science, criminal justice, and medical scholars seek to determine patterns in the age of infant’s deaths, who kills infants, and with what life circumstances in the United States. Some maternal infanticide cases involve intent to end an infant’s life, and other cases involve unsafe practices that lead to an infant’s death. Scholars warn that infanticide cases go unreported, and even suggest that “maternal infanticides may be among the least well-documented deaths in the United States” (Spinelli 2004).30 Neonaticide in the United States is primarily committed by mothers, with cases of fathers killing newborns being very rare (Kaye, Borenstein, and Donnelly 1990; Herman-Giddens et al. 2003). Psychologist Cheryl Meyer and criminal justice scholar Michelle Oberman’s study of over 200 cases of infanticide in the United States “dispel[s] the notion prevalent in media accounts that infanticide is an isolated crime or a freak occurrence, committed exclusively by women who are either insane or evil . . . As throughout history, infanticide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must be understood as a response to the societal construction of and constraints upon mothering” (2001,

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169). These findings highlight that infant death should not be viewed as solely a woman’s responsibility, but rather should signal insight into her distressed strategy of coping with severe emotional and social difficulties that are beyond her control. This level of attention to the lived experiences of women that drive them to unsafe infant abandonment or infanticide, central to reproductive justice perspectives, is lacking in safe haven legislation. Safe haven campaigns work to identify and reach out to pregnant girls and women who are at risk of dumping their babies to offer them an alternative to abandonment without recognition that they could also be given the alternative to be mothers. Not surprisingly, the goal of figuring out which girls and women should be the target has proven elusive, as an editorial in favor of safe haven laws warns: “Safe Haven isn’t the complete answer; it can’t save all newborns in peril. Research has shown that it’s impossible to predict which young mothers will abandon their babies under the stress of the situation” (Cape Cod Times 2005). This admission, even by safe haven advocates, suggests that a main challenge to ending unsafe newborn abandonment and infanticide is that some girls and women do not or cannot act maternal by embracing a perceived core responsibility of current Western motherhood to protect one’s child. The acts of abandonment, adoption, infanticide, and safe haven relinquishment all represent solutions to what some women and girls experience as the insurmountable problem of motherhood. The safe haven solution, as this book argues, addresses the social problem of unwanted infants with the intention of saving them, but does not attempt to eliminate the reasons women find themselves in the position to regard safe haven relinquishment as their most feasible option.

Organization of This Book This book draws out the social, economic, and political issues that surround safe haven laws and their use to identify the social constructions of motherhood perpetuated by safe haven advocates. My research suggests that reproductive justice understandings of the problem are stronger and more appropriate than those made visible by safe haven proponents, because a reproductive justice framing of how to address unplanned or unwanted pregnancy advances support for women and

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girls by addressing the structural inequalities that shape their lives. Chapter 1 explores how and why infant abandonment has motivated individual, regional, and national networks in the United States in the past two decades to act to intervene to save babies’ lives. It explores why some activists gather together to honor dead abandoned infants and use the religious notion of saving their souls, and how infant abandonment prevention is linked to antiabortion philosophies and aims. These safe haven proponents focus on the universal innocence of unwanted babies and their need for protection from their own mothers, who in their view could opt for abortion or abandonment, but who should choose safe haven surrender as a demonstration of their maternal love. In this view, dumped babies represent a social breach, and pregnant women who may unsafely abandon their babies represent a threat to individual infants as well as to the meaning of motherhood. Chapter 2 analyzes public service announcements, short videos, television and radio stories, websites, school curricula, and Facebook pages that have appeared since the first US safe haven law was passed by Texas in 1999 to understand how baby safe haven advocates have publicized the laws and educated the public about the need for them. This perspective is seen in the assumption that “no one likes to think about dead babies in dumpsters, but unless someone does, the problem will only grow” (Dreyer 2002, 190). In a number of states—led by both Republican and Democrat party administrations—advocates have successfully lobbied policymakers to mandate baby safe haven education in public school curricula. Through safe haven publicity and education, a main message promoted is that the power women and girls have to give life or cause death itself is a social problem in need of remedy. The safe haven solution is to direct all “dangerous” pregnant girls and women, often framed as young, low-income, or women of color, to relinquish their “unwanted” newborns at safe haven sites instead of choosing abortion, unsafe infant abandonment, or motherhood. Cases of the model use, near-miss use, and misuse of safe haven laws are the focus of chapter 3. The examination is based on how media coverage represents birth mothers, birth fathers, and others when a baby or child is left at or near an official or presumed safe haven site. These stories offer the public a way to understand the practice of safe haven use and of the people who use safe haven sites. I analyze specific cases

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reported in the media, including the remarkable case of the use of Nebraska’s original safe haven law by mothers, fathers, and grandparents to relinquish distressed teenagers. We often see in media stories and safe haven advocacy materials how individual women’s decision-making is linked to social politics around age, class, race/ethnicity, education, nationality, and other salient categories of experience and identification. I critically analyze the stereotype of the “safe haven mom” as a secretive, low-income teenager, who is often a woman of color, and examine, as a counterpoint, cases reported in the media of diverse women’s safe haven surrender experiences. To address the needs of any mother who feels she cannot raise her newborn, we must think clearly about diverse women’s ability to take safe haven action and consider seriously the limits of safe havens as a social-legal fix to unsafe baby abandonment. Chapter 4 turns to explore in greater depth the social value of safe haven babies and what contributes to their value. To make sense of this, first we must understand the broader US adoption system’s treatment of infants by age, race, and class, and question the extent to which safe haven adoptions differ from planned domestic and transnational adoptions. I analyze how media accounts of successful safe haven adoptions and comments by adoptive parents illuminate the process of adopting a safe haven baby and advance strong messages about socially approved motherhood and families. Drawing on adoption discourses, the chapter ends with the suggestion that newborns relinquished when the first safe haven laws were passed are now teenagers who may attempt to contact their biological parents, similar to adoptee search and reunification stories. The conclusion sums up the book’s argument regarding safe haven laws and the discourses that support them as best understood as reproductive justice issues, calling direct attention to the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences and the unequal social support available to women and girls within our society, which is stratified by race, class, education, age and other categories. This chapter presents the voices of the few women who have expressed their experiences of relinquishing a newborn at a safe haven site. These voices emphasize that whether a newborn was wanted or not cannot be assumed to be the only or main factor driving a woman’s motherhood decision-making. Women’s narratives encourage a broader understanding of how safe

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haven laws, portrayed by their advocates as offering a good choice for mothers, contribute to public policies and social attitudes that support narrow judgments about who should become mothers and who should relinquish motherhood, and why. This book’s analysis of the issues surrounding safe haven policies reveals that the stated intent of these policies—saving babies—conceals the social injustices that coerce some women and girls to relinquish their newborns. Giving Up Baby contributes to interdisciplinary feminist scholarship and reproductive justice activism challenging the social and legal constraints on women’s reproductive lives.

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The Work of Saving Babies’ Lives and Souls If child life was sacred, child death became an intolerable sacrilege, provoking not only parental sorrow but social bereavement as well. —Historian Viviana Zelizer on the rise of funerals for children in United States in the mid-1920s (1994, 23) You hate to see even one more child being buried  .  .  . But what’s really frightening is there are so many out there we’ll probably never know about. —Judy Sturlaugson, Garden of Angels volunteer (quoted in Whitaker 2000) The AMT Children of Hope Foundation is making an urgent plea to the public in an effort to save the lives of unwanted and abandoned infants by promoting “Safe Havens.” —AMT Children of Hope Foundation press release after a newborn was found in a Brooklyn, New York housing project trash chute in May 2011

We turn now to consider several narratives of social responsibility that are embedded within infant abandonment prevention discourses: all good mothers choose life over death; innocent infants rescued from their mothers can be saved and nurtured by deserving families; and every newborn is sacred and must be honored through community rituals. To attain the goals set out in these narratives, advocacy for safe haven laws has most visibly promoted overlapping legal and educational strategies to prevent the unsafe, public abandonment of newborns by lobbying for the institution of safe haven laws and creating campaigns to alert people about the laws. Even before states considered passing safe haven laws, some activists, drawing on these social responsibility 47

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narratives, sought to urge women to safely relinquish unwanted newborns so that they could be placed in loving adoptive families. Many of the early abandonment prevention activists built on their work to save babies’ souls through community burial rituals for newborns who were abandoned and found dead. Understanding the underlying cultural meanings that have been attached to safe haven laws requires exploration of how and why some individuals were motivated to do lobbying and education to prevent infant abandonment, and how this advocacy is linked to antiabortion philosophies and aims. This underpinning has consequences for how some women and girls are approached by safe haven advocates and portrayed as potential newborn abandoners. Through their outreach to at-risk women and girls—those considered at risk of dumping a newborn—safe haven advocacy organizations both emphasize that the law allows women to anonymously surrender a newborn and advertise that their organizations assist women to make what they interpret as the right decision to use a safe haven. These organizations do so in ways that draw on the antiabortion movement’s crisis pregnancy center model. Given the ubiquitous visibility of abortion politics in the United States, a notable dimension of safe haven advocacy is the absence of direct talk about abortion—but the unspoken omnipresence of it—in discourses about infant abandonment. The images and rhetoric employed by safe haven organizations parallels that advanced by advocates who represent what sociologist Ziad Munson (2009) calls the “individual outreach stream” of the antiabortion movement. He argues that this stream is underpublicized despite the fact that the majority of “pro-life movement volunteer hours” are spent in this stream, primarily through work in crisis pregnancy centers. Reporting five years after Munson’s research, New York Times journalist Pam Belluck (2013) suggested that support for and visibility of antiabortion pregnancy centers is rising, with 2,500 such centers serving 2 million women annually, according to one antiabortion leader. Many of these centers promote an explicit evangelical Christian pro-adoption campaign that was launched in 2007; adopted babies are symbolically saved twice, first through life (versus abortion or abandonment) and second by growing up in two-parent Christian homes (see Simon 2007; Kelly 2012; Joyce 2013, chapter 3).1 Although safe haven advocacy organizations do not explicitly identify

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themselves as affiliated with this arm of the antiabortion movement, these baby-saving activists share parallel philosophies and strategies.

Taking Action: One Infant at a Time, Dead or Alive A shared aspect of efforts to prevent unsafe infant abandonment is that many organizations claim to have been inspired by an emotionally gripping experience of one individual who does not act as part of a larger movement or organization. These everyday citizens are moved to action to prevent infant abandonment and honor the souls of abandoned babies, due to their strong reactions to learning about an abandoned newborn’s death. A 2000 report in TIME magazine about the safe haven legislative movement sweeping the United States included this depiction of a Pennsylvania woman bringing her local community together to “do something” to prevent another abandoned newborn: The impetus for change comes from small groups of homespun activists. In suburban Pittsburgh, Pa., Gigi Kelly, a nurse and mother, was inspired to begin a local campaign after a healthy 8-lb. baby boy was left in a trash bag behind her family’s church. Kelly found an old laundry basket, lined it with a warm blanket and put it on her front porch. Then she called reporters with a plea for young mothers to bring their babies to her. I’ll take it from there, she promised. Nobody has taken up her offer yet, but still she waits. “It’s a strange feeling when you lay your head on the pillow at night,” she says. “Kind of spooky.” With only a manual typewriter and a fax machine, she turned her Baskets for Babies program into a public awareness campaign for young moms who think they have nowhere to turn. Now when night falls on Pittsburgh, 608 families leave their porch lights on and have their baskets ready. (Roche 2000)2

This narrative emphasizes the action of one woman, one who carries the authority of being both a mother and health care professional and who has some media savvy. As we will see in many other infant abandonment prevention narratives, seemingly on her own, one person (in this case, Kelly) took action when she believed that “young moms” were in need of anonymous, safe drop-off options, and this impetus transformed into an education campaign and 600-strong volunteer effort.

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The source of Kelly’s “spooky” feelings are not described, and perhaps reflect the deep sense of responsibility she would feel if a baby was left in her doorstep basket. This history of Baskets for Babies, and the name of the project itself, does not comment on the circumstances of women who might otherwise have nowhere to turn with an unwanted newborn. None of the baskets were ever used, but the project served as a platform for a future safe haven policy (McNulty 1999). The organization’s suggestion of fire stations as drop-off sites follows the model provided by the first safe haven law, passed in Texas in 1999, the same year Baskets for Babies was organized. The Pittsburgh effort transformed from baskets to hospitals, and by 2003, when Pennsylvania passed a safe haven law, 19 Pittsburgh-area hospitals already were “part of a network that provided safe havens for newborns under a voluntary program called A Hand To Hold” (Fuoco 2003; see also Carpenter 2000). Kelly’s local activism directly addressed preventing unsafe baby abandonment, but other activists shifted their attention to safe havens from different advocacy activities: most often this has been burial services for abandoned infants. Exploring this realm of advocacy helps make sense of the connection between infant burials and infant safe havens. Organizations across the United States and in other countries are dedicated to providing burials for abandoned and unclaimed infants. The aim of these groups is to provide names and dignified memorials, and to bury the bodies in marked graves located in special sections of cemeteries. If advocates did not provide burials the remains would be deposited in unmarked graves—a circumstance perceived as intolerable by these advocates because it inadequately recognizes the individual being and, importantly, the dead baby’s soul. Although in Christian thought a proper burial is not needed for a soul to ascend to heaven, these rituals bring together a community of people to emphasize an underlying pro-life advocacy message, as explained on the Priests for Life website in the “Why is Life Sacred” section: “Christians proclaim a Gospel of Life. This ‘life’ is sacred because it takes its origin in God, belongs to God, and returns to God . . . But in the end, and to find one’s way through the challenges of this brief life, one must come to terms with the fact that to touch human life is to touch God, and therefore the only way to touch human life is with love.” Infant burial advocates’ expressions of caring and love for abandoned babies

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enact these very connections. The community in which the pregnant woman gave birth failed to save her newborn’s life. The community assembled by these activists responds to this failure by demonstrating that our society does care about every baby’s life and every baby’s death. A network of baby burial activists has encouraged local groups to claim areas of cemeteries, handcraft baby-sized coffins, and memorialize the unclaimed remains of babies by celebrating the sacredness of life. The nonprofit organization Garden of Innocence National, based in California, advertises on its website burial services for “abandoned and unidentified children,” with locations in eight cities in the United States and in Montreal, Canada (n.d.a). Memorial services feature little caskets lined with brightly colored fabric and toys, funeral flowers, music, poetry, officiates, and formally dressed attendants. In San Diego, the conservative Catholic group Knights of Columbus assembles up to 70 attendants at infant memorials, dramatically dressed in black and red with “capes, caps, gloves and swords,” as reported on the “Who are the Guys in Uniform?” page of the Garden of Innocence San Diego website (Garden of Innocence San Diego n.d.). The founding story of Garden of Innocence, similar to Gigi Kelly’s Baskets for Babies story in Pittsburgh, centers on a powerful emotional reaction to an abandoned baby felt by Elissa Davey, a white woman living in San Diego County and working as a realtor. As the website explains: Garden of Innocence was founded by a wonderful group of people in San Diego, California in 1998. Elissa Davey’s compassionate vision began to unfold. After reading an article about a baby boy who was found in a trash can on a local college campus in Chula Vista, California. Elissa decided to take action and do something about it. Many times, too often, we run across stories like these, only to think about it for a short time and eventually forget and move on with our daily lives . . . Approximately one year later, a “Dignified Place” [in a cemetery] was established. Since that time every baby declared abandoned or unidentified in the San Diego County has been released to Garden of Innocence. Garden of Innocence/ San Diego is our first garden, leading the way to start other gardens so no other infant is sent home without someone who cared. (Garden of Innocence n.d.b)

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The home is heaven, and the organization’s effort is to establish a community of care for newborns who died due to maltreatment. The spiritual dimension of the organization’s ambitious work is bolstered by the efforts of Davey, who is a “Practitioner with Church of Religious Science and is an ordained non denominational minister” and “Dr. Pastor Netreia Carroll, (known as Mother Theresa of San Diego) [who] has partnered with Elissa Davey to set the grounds for Gardens in every state and around the world.” The website’s “What Do We Do?” page announces, “we are non-denominational. Every faith, every nationality is welcome in this garden. We are colored [sic] blind. We reach out to our little babies and love them when no one else did” (Garden of Innocence n.d.a). The possessive use of “our little babies” demonstrates the guardian relationship that such activists create, which is also emphasized in other the work of others. Rest In His Arms is a nonprofit based in the Chicago area that “spiritually adopts” abandoned babies in order to provide names, memorial services, and marked burial sites. Using language similar to Garden of Innocence’s nondenominational appeal, but emphasizing specifically its Christian approach, the website states that “Each child is lovingly laid to rest and sent home to the open and comforting arms of our Creator” (Rest In His Arms 2009). The group’s webpage includes a drawing of Jesus comforting an upset infant, and a cross serves as the “T” in “Rest” in His Arms, symbolizing the organization’s religious perspective. Rest In His Arms provides information about the Illinois safe haven law, and the website has a link to a listing of all state safe haven laws. At the start of this research I knew nothing about infant burial organizations, which points to my lack of moving in the same social and political circles with individuals and groups charged with saving souls. I was quite surprised to follow a trail from safe haven advocacy to burial activists, although others would not be. For example, former Louisiana Republican Representative Tony Perkins, who went on to become the president of the conservative Family Research Council, noted that nine years after the state implemented a safe haven law, a woman approached him “who had been making clothes for the babies that had been abandoned and providing funeral services for them, asking why more was not done to promote the Safe Haven Law” (quoted in Iancu 2010, 246). The advocacy trail leads still further, from the mission of saving souls via proper burial memorials to the mission of preventing the loss of

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souls to attempts to save “unborn babies” by antiabortion advocates. The overarching connection between these activist efforts is the promotion of visible actions to save innocent babies’ souls and lives from their mothers’ decisions. Nonprofit infant burial organizations are symbolically linked to antiabortion perspectives and run parallel to some antiabortion advocates’ activities. Feminist medical anthropologist Lynn Morgan (2009) writes that the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago has a “body find” strategy, in which they remove fetal remains from pathology labs and distribute them to organizations across the United States for public burials. A particularly elaborate burial staging took place in 1998, when a Christian pro-life group held a funeral for 54 fetuses following the strategic release of the fetal remains by a San Bernardino County, California coroner to the group (Morgan 2009, 241). The remains were held as medical evidence in a year-long case against a truck driver who illegally placed the remains in a field; the evidence otherwise would have been incinerated. The group named each fetus and filmed the parade of 54 little white caskets at the burial (Morgan 2009, 241). Ziad Munson discovered abortion memorials across the country, including an annual ritual in Charleston, South Carolina, to “honor babies killed by abortion”; tombstone markers established by Catholic Knights of Columbus in Watertown, Massachusetts; and the “chapel of innocents” in the Twin Cities, Minnesota (2009, 173). Morgan (2009, 240–41), Sanger (2006), Munson (2009, 116), and other scholars point to the pervasiveness in antiabortion organizations of the “culture of life” discourse, emphasized by Pope John Paul II in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) to mark the sacredness of human life “from conception to natural death.” This discourse is evident in infant burial and abandonment prevention advocacy. Abandoned infant burial organizations help clarify that all efforts to save babies are connected to a network of projects to save lives, bodies, and souls both before and after birth. What is often left out of this pinpointed focus on “babies” is the symbolic and real position of the mothers who are framed as uncaring criminals or as irresponsible citizens, or who are simply not acknowledged at all. Similarly, discourses surrounding safe haven laws draw on beliefs about the sacredness of each innocent baby’s life and the importance of taking action to save each and every life and soul. By exploring several high-profile groups that work in newborn abandonment

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prevention—each established before safe haven laws were passed—we can discern advocates’ aim to save newborns by urging some women and girls to become legal, responsible, and invisible safe haven moms.

The Imagined Hope Family and Community Efforts to Save Babies The prominent safe haven awareness organization AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation is based on Long Island, New York, and has a very active leader. A paramedic for the Nassau County Police Department and a father and grandfather, Timothy Jaccard started up and ran the organization out of his home in 1998. AMT Children of Hope, as its “Who We Are” website page explains, predates safe haven legislation and was established as an infant burial organization. Jaccard was featured in a local news article with a title that emphasizes his current mission, “Inside Tim Jaccard’s Children of Hope and Baby Safe Haven Crusade” (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010). In 1997 Jaccard responded as an ambulance medical technician to a scene where a newborn girl had drowned in a courthouse toilet, and spontaneously wept. Within weeks, three more abandoned newborns were reported to him, initiating his activism. It is unclear whether in Jaccard’s 37 years of AMT service these were the only abandoned newborn cases to which he responded. These deaths motivated Jaccard to found the nonprofit foundation, which began as a fundraising group for abandoned newborns’ burial services. Jaccard gains legal custody of local abandoned babies who die in order to “adopt” them, arranges burials, and visits the Children of Hope section of the Holy Rood, New Jersey, Catholic cemetery monthly to say a prayer for “his” babies (“For Unwanted Babies, a Safety Net” 2000). Each buried baby is given a name, and all share the last name Hope (Archibold 1999). The Hope family is represented as diverse and embracing all lives: the foundation’s information section of their website pledges to “help save the lives of infants who have been abandoned . . . without regard to race, color, age, creed or national origin.” In addition to the Christian (and, more specifically, Catholic) burial rites that Children of Hope sponsors to save babies’ souls, other religious symbolism is reflected in narratives of the organization’s work.

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According to a 2010 “Safe Haven Story” posted on the website, Jaccard is a Catholic church community member, attends coming-of-age religious initiations for children, and feels deep pain about infant death: The fact so many newborn infants have been adopted to loving families and I have been invited to their conformations [sic], baptisms, and then to have to baptize the baby that has been victim to neonaticide knowing that the child could have been adopted by a loving family is heart wrenching.3 I get a knot in my stomach thinking that this child could have survived had the mother called and relinquished the baby anonymously to us. (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2010)

This story includes a Good Friday and Easter inspirational narrative. On Good Friday in 2010, “Tim was having one of his rare breakfasts with his wife when the crisis center in Ohio contacted him. They had a woman in labor on the telephone [who was not at a hospital and needed support]. The call was transferred to Tim, who had done five previous telephone births. Within one and a half hours, the labor would be over and the baby born.”4 This turn of events implies that Children of Hope had a relationship with a crisis pregnancy center in Ohio. (I found evidence of the Children of Hope hotline network in Ohio and Massachusetts, but not a name of a center in Ohio.) The story gives details of the successful birth of a boy and delivery of the placenta in spite of the birthing woman’s refusal to seek assistance. Following the birth, The birth mother then rested for about 25 minutes, all the time keeping in telephone contact with Tim, who kept trying to convince her to let him have someone come and care for her. The mother kept refusing, and after Tim was convinced it was safe for her, she agreed to get into her car and bring the baby to a local hospital. Meanwhile, Tim has [sic] to inform the staff at the hospital as to the details and requirements of the law. Soon after, the mother arrived at the hospital and the baby was handed over to the medical staff. . . . Despite his pleas, the mother refused to stay. She did agree to keep in contact with Tim, and called him back every hour for the first 6 hours. She also called on Saturday and Sunday mornings and told him she was sore but doing well. (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2010)

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This woman is represented as recalcitrant because she refuses birthing, postpartum, or transportation assistance for herself, yet she is a good mother because she maintained regular contact with Jaccard, gives birth to a healthy baby, wraps him warmly, and drives him to a hospital to safely surrender him to a medical staff member. This woman’s independence and rejection of the medical care offered to her support safe haven laws’ assumption that safe haven moms have the ability to give birth at home and drive to a safe haven site within hours of doing so. We see also that Jaccard not only had to educate the safe haven mom about the law; he also had to teach hospital staff about how to comply with it. Following this Good Friday success, the story continues, “on Easter Sunday, Tim took another call. This time the mother had already given birth. She agreed to leave the baby at a local church.” Saving two newborns from the possibility of unsafe abandonment in one holiday weekend is remarkable in itself, and this story’s conclusion, with a baby given to church staff on Easter Sunday, signals the entry of the newborn into a religious community, one that is celebrating the power of Christ. Assisting others to safely surrender their newborns takes on a higher meaning. Jaccard works to inspire others to join his mission through success stories such as this, and has been a leader in urging the passage and use of safe haven laws. At the time of the foundation’s start, no state had yet adopted safe haven legislation. Jaccard’s research into infanticide “brought him to the Center[s] for Disease Control, where he testified about the need for new laws. It was there that he met Congresswoman Jeannie Morrison of Texas and John Tyson, the D.A. in Mobile Alabama.” This history reveals that Jaccard became a member of the inner circle of individuals who designed the first safe haven policies. That they met at the Centers for Disease Control suggests a public health framing of the approach to prevent newborn abandonment; however, the safe haven laws implemented represent a criminal justice intervention, one that does not mandate medical care for safe haven moms. The foundation’s inspiration and motivation to be at the forefront of safe haven legal advocacy is offered in the website’s “About Us” section, emphasizing the value of the laws to elevate society: After a series of cases of infanticide in Nassau County, the emotional impact began taking its toll, on ourselves as well as the community. We

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sought a level of closure, peace and hope. Looking after these unfortunate victims of a society gone astray through a dignified burial gave us a sense of healing from this pain. We turned our focus toward the despondent people who would commit such a horrible desperate act. Our effort to enlighten these people to other means of solving their problems is the driving force of the Foundation. Although this is a huge undertaking, we believe that doing nothing, as more infants are found abandoned shortly after birth, would be a far greater tragedy. (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2007a)

Echoing antiabortion advocates’ assessment that abortion is a measure of a society’s lack of well-being (see Mason 2002), the foundation identifies abandoned babies as “unfortunate victims of a society gone astray.” Although mothers are not specifically mentioned, Children of Hope states that it moved from concern for only dead babies to focus on “despondent people who would commit such a horrible desperate act.” These advocates suggest that a turning point was moving away from infant burials to focus on education of pregnant women about safe haven relinquishment as the best way to prevent infanticide. The new goal is to prevent moral damage and pain felt by a community when confronted by a newborn death that could have been prevented. However, a significant consequence of this reworked focus is that it leads Children of Hope to frame specific types of women and girls as at risk of unsafely abandoning their babies without offering an account of how social inequalities shape pregnant women’s perceptions about whether or not they can raise a newborn. Further, working underneath the surface of safe haven advocates’ call to save newborns from preventable death at the hands of a distressed mother is a set of broader associations, which we can see are connected to antiabortion politics.

Parallel Antiabortion and Antiabandonment Efforts The safe haven advocacy organization AMT Children of Hope and other infant abandonment prevention advocacy organizations, including California’s Project Cuddle and Florida’s A Safe Haven for Newborns, do not address abortion as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) do, but there are significant parallels in the language, strategies, and philosophies used

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by both safe haven and CPC organizations to reach individual pregnant women who feel that they have inadequate resources or who do not wish to raise a child. Even if politically safe haven organizations step back from a stand on abortion, symbolically their language and some strategies borrow from—or at least run parallel to—antiabortion advocates in their crisis pregnancy center activism. To more fully understand the connections between newborn abandonment prevention efforts and antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers requires a closer look at the decades-long crisis pregnancy center movement. Crisis pregnancy centers were established before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, when some states liberalized their abortion laws, and now have extensive, even international, networks run by large organizations including Care Net, Bethany Christian Services, Birthright, Heartbeat International (Lin and Dailard 2002, 4; Belluck 2013), and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (Munson 2009, 115). The currently flourishing CPC movement has been rebuilt to project an image that is different from the fetus-centered strategies of the 1980s antiabortion movement that shaped CPC practices, which included showing women graphic images of aborted fetuses and warning women not to be “murderers” (see Kelly 2012, 211). Sociologist Kimberly Kelly’s ethnographic study on CPCs charts how abortion rights advocates in the late 1980s publicized misinformation and the traumatic emotional experiences women had, leading to lawsuits by women against CPCs and even loss of support within the antiabortion movement in the early 1990s (2012, 211). The leaders of CPC organizations then reformed the centers’ practices by standardizing counseling training, banning graphic fetal images, and providing material resources that pregnant women lacked in their lives, leading to a jump in the number of CPCs from 600 to 2,300 between the early 1990s and 2009 (see Kelly 2012, 212). Given this volatile history and conflicts among antiabortion philosophies, there remain disagreements within the movement about the importance and purpose of CPCs (Kelly 2012). Some antiabortion advocates are devoted to the individual outreach that grounds crisis pregnancy center efforts, and valorize this form of activism above others (see Munson 2009, 12). In a 2013 New York Times article on the increased power of antiabortion pregnancy centers, an Americans United for Life leader contended that “They’re really the darlings of the pro-life move-

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ment . . . [They have a] ground level, one-on-one, reaching-the-womanwhere-she’s-at approach” (Belluck 2013). CPCs have carved out their own antiabortion turf and aim to “rescue” individual women from the “tragedy” of abortion. This form of advocacy is situated beyond prolife political bureaucracy and formal organizing (Munson 2009). To draw women in, CPCs list their services under “abortion alternatives” in telephone book yellow pages, which comes before “abortion providers,” and “their advertising is often deliberately ambiguous” (Munson 2009, 114)—meaning that it is strategically unclear to unknowing viewers of the ads that CPCs hold an antiabortion stance. Crisis pregnancy centers offer services free of charge; they rely on private, church, and other funding sources, including state fees earned through “Choose Life” license plates (Kleder and Richmond-Crum 2008, 2).5 In the early 2000s, CPCs in some states received federal funding through abstinence-only education programs sponsored by the George W. Bush administration (Kleder and Richmond-Crum 2008, 2). Between 2001 and 2006, CPCs received over $30 million in capacity building abstinence-only grants (Richardson and Nash 2006, 10). A Washington Post article explains, “President Bush has been an advocate for pregnancy resource centers and for abstinence-only sex education. Few of the pregnancy resource centers—also called crisis pregnancy centers—received any federal funding before 2001” (Kaufman 2006, A8).6 Journalist Pam Belluck (2013) reports that in Texas, CPC funding increased in 2011 and abortion clinics were required to give the names of centers to women at least 24 hours before providing abortion care; the state simultaneously cut family planning funding. The language CPCs use is in some areas deceptively neutral, but in other areas transparently antiabortion. For example, one of the largest networks of crisis pregnancy centers, Care Net, explains its work this way on its website: Care Net and our network of more than 1,100 pregnancy centers offer hope to women facing unplanned pregnancies by providing practical help and emotional support. In the words of TIME magazine, pregnancy centers are the “kind, calm, nonjudgmental” face of the pro-life movement [Gibbs 2007]. Free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, abortion information, parenting classes, and material assistance are just some of the many ser-

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vices offered that empower women to choose life. As an umbrella organization, Care Net seeks to promote, prepare, and plant pregnancy centers across North America. Care Net also plays a key role in reaching women facing unplanned pregnancies through our 24/7 Option Line call center and website. (Care Net 2013)

The list of Care Net’s services may appear comprehensive and unbiased; however, investigations into the strategies of crisis pregnancy centers demonstrate “consistent use of false and misleading information; biased and manipulative counseling; and delay tactics” orchestrated to prevent a woman from having an abortion (Kleder and Richmond-Crum 2008, 6–7; see also Mertus 1990).7 Indeed, the abortion information Care Net provides is antiabortion, with counselors making false claims that link abortion with a higher risk of breast cancer, infertility, and “post-abortion stress syndrome” (Kleder and Richmond-Crum 2008, 3; see also Major, Cozzarelli, and Cooper et al. 2000; Lee 2003; Oaks 2003b; Silverstein 2007, 111–12, Belluck 2013).8 CPCs often mask their antiabortion position to appeal to a range of women (see Mertus 1990; Richardson and Nash 2006, 10), and some CPCs use ultrasound images to encourage pregnant women to bond with their fetuses (see Taylor 2008). On the “About Us” page of Care Net’s website, an explicit antiabortion goal is clear: “Many have worked for years in the legal and public policy spheres to put an end to abortion. Care Net, however, seeks a more immediate route by supporting one woman at a time, to spare her and her unborn child the anguish of abortion.” Reproductive justice advocates point out that although CPCs do provide services that are attractive to women, such as financial assistance, shelter, diapers, and baby food (see Smith 2005; Kelly 2012), CPCs unfairly misrepresent the goal of their mission in an attempt to draw in women who seek services to expose them to antiabortion messages. There have been attempts in some cities to require CPCs to post signs at entrances and in waiting rooms listing services offered and whether a licensed physician is on staff (see Mertus 1990; Feminist Wire 2011; Belluck 2013). Only in San Francisco has this been successful, and bills in five states have failed (Belluck 2013). Crisis pregnancy centers are afforded legitimacy in the eyes of some state governments, with the strongest evidence found in southern states.

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In three Alabama counties, pro-life judges have required minors seeking abortion rights via judicial bypass to receive counseling from the antiabortion, Christian, evangelical crisis pregnancy center Sav-a-Life (Silverstein 2007, 105–06).9 These judges required young women to hear both antiabortion and religious advice, with counselors attempting to save the life of the unborn and the spiritual life of the young woman (Silverstein 2007, 104–11). Further, Louisiana’s safe haven politics is enmeshed with the state-level institutionalization of the merger between crisis pregnancy centers and safe haven sites; the law specifically states that pregnancy crisis centers are safe haven surrender sites (Sanger 2006, 769; State of Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services, 2012). Another visible area of overlap between crisis pregnancy centers and some safe haven advocacy organizations is a shared target population and advertising language. Website readers are positioned as young women who lack social support systems that would help them cope with their distress over being pregnant. The website of the Florida organization, A Safe Haven for Newborns: The Gloria M. Silverio Foundation, asserts, “you couldn’t let anyone know you are pregnant and now you don’t know what to do . . . you are not alone . . . Don’t abandon your baby! Save your baby’s life and yourself from a lifetime of guilt and anguish.” The New York–New Jersey based Children of Hope advertises an anonymous crisis hotline similar to A Safe Haven for Newborns’: “Overwhelmed, Facing it alone, Nobody to Trust? Free Answers Before You Do Something You’ll Regret For The Rest Of Your Life.” Photos of infant burial services conducted by police in dress uniform are featured on the AMT Children of Hope Foundation home page, and yet in a seeming contradiction, the same page has this red ink appeal to pregnant women: “Please don’t Panic. No cost . . . No cops . . . no parents.” This suggests that the target audience is teenagers who are concealing pregnancy and are concerned that their parents would be contacted by the foundation. Such language invokes crisis pregnancy centers’ antiabortion appeals to women, including these website messages: “Scared. Pressured. Trapped. If a baby is not in your plans right now, it’s possible you’re feeling at least one of these emotions—and abortion might seem like the best way out” (OptionLine 2012) and “In this tragic decision, not only is a human life snuffed out, but a woman’s life is changed forever” (Care

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Net 2013). Insert “abandoning your newborn” for “abortion,” and the messages mutually reinforce each other. Further echoing antiabortion language, Children of Hope’s hotline aims “to assist pregnant women in crisis who have nowhere else to turn”; it is run out of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts, indicating that Jaccard coordinates a regional network of safe haven activists (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010), paralleling the action of crisis pregnancy centers to establish regional networks (see Munson 2009). At both CPCs and safe haven organizations, women seek out goods and services although they are not considering either abortion or abandonment. The statistics that Silverio’s Florida organization posts on its website on the “What We Do” tab show that over the course of 13 years, thousands more women are assisted than the number of newborns surrendered at safe haven sites: “206 newborns saved from abandonment, securing their future . . . 5,000 girls/woman [sic] assisted in their time of need or crisis.” Children of Hope, based in the New York–New Jersey area, runs a crisis intervention hotline to talk women out of abandonment and offers CPC-like services: with “funds gathered from donations and corporate sponsors, [the group] pays $2,500 for counseling, prenatal care and hospital fees for expectant mothers to help them through the entire adoption process” (Meadows 2006). That safe haven organizations are not solely reaching the target of women who might unsafely abandon a newborn is in line with what CPCs document about the majority of women served not being in their primary target audience. Only 20 percent of CPC clients are women who have a positive pregnancy test and would consider abortion (Kelly 2012, 214). The value activists see in reaching even those who are beyond their ideal audiences is the opportunity to communicate one-on-one their overarching antiabortion or antiabandonment perspective, with the hope that each woman will influence both her own and others’ reproductive choices. Safe haven organizations borrow from abortion politics discourses when they design messages to reach women and girls. In 2007, AMT Children of Hope Foundation framed pregnant women as premeditated murderers, echoing the 1980s perspective of CPCs: “This is where our most important purpose lies. All of the efforts of the Foundation pay off if we can change the mind of one person who had been intent on murdering their child and throwing them away. It can be as simple as discussing al-

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ternatives they either were unaware of or had not considered” (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2007a). The language of “alternatives” draws on antiabortion pregnancy alternatives discourses used by crisis pregnancy centers. At the same time, the foundation seeks support from the broadest possible audience, and seeks to distance itself from abortion politics, as noted in the “About Us” website section: “The Foundation always keeps in mind that people are entitled to their own opinions and choices. Do [sic] to the political and social ramifications, we cannot be advocates of pro-life or pro-choice issues.” Providing a different example of abortion discourses present in safe haven language, the California-based Project Cuddle’s motto is “Providing safe and legal alternatives to baby abandonment.” Both the antiabortion movement’s “alternatives” discourse and the pro-choice movement’s “safe and legal” language is reflected in the organization’s rhetoric, which has the effect of aligning with neither position. Abortion is not presented as an option in infant abandonment prevention discourses, reflecting a separation from CPC efforts. For safe haven advocates adoption is featured as the best alternative to an unwanted pregnancy, and the target safe haven client group is women and girls who are pregnant beyond legal abortion limits. The Children of Hope website defends its work and supports adoption in several ways. The group answered one challenge to the anonymous and legal surrender of newborns, “should parents be forced to accept responsibility for their actions?”, by advocating adoption in its FAQs: Not every person who is a biological parent, either the woman who gives birth or the male who provided the sperm, is willing or able to raise a child. Forcing those who are unwilling or unable to try to be parents is unsound social policy, experimenting with the lives and souls of babies. The most responsible action most of these parents can take at this point in their lives is to ensure that their baby is in the hands of someone who can provide a caring, stable environment. (AMT Children of Hope 2007b)

This statement suggests that there are capable and incapable biological parents, leading to an imperative for some biological parents, as well as social policymakers, to create mechanisms for adoption. Jaccard expanded his safe haven advocacy from the local community to the state of New York, and then to the United States nationally. He

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helped design New York’s Safe Haven law, which was established to be wider than many states’ laws, allowing a good Samaritan to be the one who relinquishes the newborn on behalf of the mother. Jaccard went on in 2006 to found the National Safe Haven Alliance in Virginia near Washington, DC, and is president of that organization and the foundation. The National Alliance sponsors an attractive website that features each state’s safe haven laws and sells baby safe haven signs, stickers, and decals (n.d.a). Jaccard is credited for the county being “first in the nation to install Safe Haven demarcations beneath all blue-and-white hospital signs and designate ambulances as official drop-off sites” (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010). The original work of Children of Hope also continues. Jaccard voices distress about newborns still being abandoned and about organizing funerals: “You stand there and look down in the grave and know the child could have been here running around, playing in the grass and having a good time if the mother had just reached out to us” (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010). This conclusion both places all responsibility on mothers and evokes antiabortion attention to children who are “missing” because they were aborted.10 Children of Hope aims to save babies from irresponsible biological mothers, and offers resources to assist women in making the choice to surrender their unwanted babies to safe havens for adoption by deserving families. The focus of safe haven organizations and CPCs on women since the 1990s may appear on the surface to align with a reproductive justice framework that calls for attention to the circumstances of women’s reproductive lives. Women are relying on these organizations to meet some basic needs. Looking deeper, a reproductive justice analysis makes clear several points about the safe haven organization provision of services based on a CPC model. First, safe haven laws do not include the establishment of service-providing organizations; these are nonprofit organizations defining a role to support the laws. Second, in the face of federal and state budget cuts to social services and the economic downturn, women and girls are in need of services and find them at CPCs and safe haven organizations that have stepped in where the state has failed to provide for immediate material needs. Third, safe haven and CPC organizations do not address the social injustices that support some—but not all—women and girls’ ability to raise their own children.

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The CPC-backed safe haven organization support is a different model of support than the one that reproductive justice advocates promote, which acknowledges the decision-making agency of an individual woman while recognizing the social and economic constraints of her options and working against structural inequalities in our society.

Guardian of Angels and Safely Surrendered Newborns Across the country from Tim Jaccard’s organization is the like-minded Garden of Angels, Inc.–Safe Surrender for Newborns, founded by Debi Faris (also known as Faris-Cifelli) in Yucaipa, California, located 80 miles east of Los Angeles. Faris is credited with spearheading the introduction of a safe haven law in California, and her website features information about safe haven laws. Jaccard and Faris share a worldview and grassroots advocacy strategies, yet there is no demonstrable formal or informal link between their organizations. Their activities and rhetoric are noticeably similar. One of the Garden of Angels’ mottos, meant to communicate to pregnant women that there are options other than “throwing them [newborns] away” is, “Safe. Legal. Confidential. No questions asked.” As with Children of Hope, this language also invokes abortion discourses, but in this case resonates with the pro-choice message “Keep abortion safe and legal” (Condit 1990, 92). Children of Hope and Garden of Angels rely on fundraising from local businesses and events. Garden of Angels holds car washes and bake sales, and the Garden of Angels Car Show teams up with car clubs such as Inland Empire Pick Ups United to support the “safe surrender of newborns” (Otto 2008). Another fundraiser was sponsored by Bijoux Luxury Jewelers in Redlands, which hid (publicly abandoned!) a diamond in the city, then provided clues to its location (Juedes 2009). Fitting with the organization’s philosophy and name, actress Roma Downey, known for her role on the TV series Touched by an Angel, is a celebrity supporter of Garden of Angels, speaking and fundraising on behalf of the organization. Whether this range of fundraising strategies is needed or symbolic of highly visible community support is a reasonable question. In 2005 Faris won $27 million through the California lottery, and perceived it as a thank-you from God and from all of the children she had saved (Flaccus 2004).

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Before establishing the abandoned infant burial organization, Faris sought out information about what happened to the bodies of unclaimed babies. A story in People magazine explains, “if investigators could not locate a willing relative, abandoned babies are cremated, their ashes placed in a cardboard box and stored in a county warehouse for up to three years. If they remain unclaimed, [investigator] Doyle Tolbert said, the ashes would be buried in a county plot alongside, amount [sic] others, ‘murderers, drug dealers and prostitutes.’ That information horrified Faris” (Schindehette and Hannah 2000; see also Wescott 2002). In short, the sacred ashes of pure and innocent babies should not be intermixed with those of sinful adults (despite, one might note, the Christian belief that Christ was crucified with thieves, yet was thought to remain pure). The horror of this possibility and desire for recognition of each and every abandoned baby underlies the philosophies of Children of Hope, Garden of Innocence, Rest In His Arms, and other abandoned infant burial organizations. In addition to the Garden of Angels’ emphasis on “laying tiny souls to rest” (Wescott 2002), the maternal intimacy that Faris shares with infant bodies illustrates a blurred boundary between care for live and care for dead babies that echoes antiabortion advocates’ blurring of a “preborn” and born babies (see Sanger 2006, 808):11 She has conducted the most solemn of rituals again and again, in the antiseptic crypts of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. After removing the plastic wrap, Debi Faris washes and rocks each baby. “You can always see a face, and I never forget it” she says.12 “I rub their little hands and toes and say a prayer that people will be touched by this child. I take my time. Then I wrap the baby in a handmade receiving blanket, place it in a casket with toys and poems, and carry it to the car for the ride back. I need to be alone for the drive. I need the silence.” (Wescott 2002)

By treating the infant as if she or he is alive, Faris implies that the baby should have lived and should have received this type of attentive maternal care. The coffin replaces a car seat. But Faris’s private recognition of individual babies is not adequate to her aims. The funeral ritual means that the baby is recognized by a community; the dead infant is not only Faris’s baby, she or he is “our” baby. The responsibility is placed

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on “us” to heal a broken community—indeed, an entire society that has been defiled by the irresponsibility of some mothers. This point was made clear by Faris during a 2006 Garden of Angels burial service for Angela, a baby left in a trash bin by her 18-year-old mother and the 77th to be honored by the Garden of Angels.13 She addressed the 50 attendees with thanks: “You are her family. She is your daughter, your sister. And I’m so grateful you’re here to embrace her” (quoted in Glenn 2006). Surrogate family members participate in the memorial services. Faris gives each baby a first name that is engraved on a cross. At the gravesite, she releases dozens of doves under the shade of a mulberry tree (Flaccus 2004); they “represent the willing surrender . . . to God” of the baby’s soul (Glenn 2006). A Redlands Church of Christ pastor led Angela’s service, offering a comforting way to think about a baby’s body in a trash can: “Some people may say there is no place more forsaken than a trash can where a baby has been thrown away . . . But it is there that God is in a very special way welcoming that child to himself ” (quoted in Glenn 2006). In this view the disrespectful circumstances of death are mitigated, and the soul of the infant is safely protected in a way that its body was not. A peaceful closure is provided as a counterpoint to a violent death. Naming each abandoned infant bestows individuality and connection to cultural narratives and naming practices. Taking a journalist on a tour of the Garden of Angels, Faris explained that she gives the unknown infants first names, using the etymologies of the name as epitaphs. Over there, she says, is Grace (God’s Blessing), who was found in a Palmdale aqueduct by two teenagers. And there is Linden (Excellent Worker). Only his head was found by a road crew clearing debris. And over there is Jordan (God’s Heir), who was a week old when he was found by someone looking for bottles and cans in a trash bin on a Malibu beach. (Roche 2000)

These narratives of the careless demise of infants’ bodies contrast with the peaceful, loving actions and Christian religious symbols featured at Garden of Angels’ memorials, which serve to restore an abandoned infant to a family, community, and society that cares. The organization celebrates the innocent babies’ lives, short or lived only in

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the womb—innocence that could not be taken by the bad mothers who denied their newborn’s lives. The memorial symbolically rehabilitates the society that allows women to commit infanticide by taking responsibility for the eternal life of the babies. Although abortion is not mentioned by Garden of Angels, the attribution of individuality and recognition of a babies’ face after death (which seems unlikely for the bodies of some of the babies featured in the scenarios above) resonates with antiabortion advocates’ strategy to deter women from having abortions by showing them sonogram images and models of fetuses to demonstrate the development of baby-looking features. The attribution of fetal personhood and an individual identity is used commonly to argue against abortion (see Morgan and Michaels 1999).14 Abandoned baby burial services reinforce antiabortion discourses through their demonstration that individualized care can and should be accorded to each and every baby, while at the same time highlighting the tragedy of a universalized abandoned innocent in a way that invokes the antiabortion movement’s use of the unborn (see Petchesky 1987; Kaplan 1993; Oaks 2001; Mason 2002; Taylor 2008). The absence of the baby’s family from the burial symbolically excludes the biological parents from the constructed community that steps in to care for the abandoned newborn. Society’s failure to protect the baby is most specifically a maternal failure; to enhance society by saving all babies, all pregnant women need to be reached one by one and convinced either to mother their babies or to relinquish them for adoption. Abandonment and abortion are framed as socially unacceptable options. Faris’s advocacy, like Tim Jaccard’s AMT Children of Hope, expanded from burials to include infant abandonment prevention and lobbying for safe haven laws. Faris states that the law’s “purpose is to encourage women to choose life for their babies” (quoted in Schindehette and Hannah 2000) and is a corrective to a social problem: “This is what we’ve become as a society . . . It is easy to throw our children away” (quoted in Roche 2000). Both statements and sentiments reflect standard antiabortion rhetoric, such as, “it isn’t enough just to save individual babies. The country must be saved from itself ” (Munson 2009, 125), and apply it to infant abandonment prevention: abortion and abandonment are “choosing death,” while safe surrender, adoption, and parenting equal “choos-

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ing life.” Faris appealed to her state assemblyman, who did not take up the safe haven cause, but she then caught the attention of Republican state senator Jim Brulte, who introduced the California Safe Haven bill in January 2000 (Wescott 2002). Brulte’s lobbying strategy was designed like that in other states, targeting the social problem of young mothers feeling enough distress to consider newborn abandonment: “Our message to young mothers is that guilt, shame or panic are not reasons to destroy a newborn’s chance at life” (Brulte quoted in Roche 2000). Faris testified four different times to urge passage of the bill, and on a “full term pregnancy timeline,” the bill passed nine months after it was introduced (Wescott 2002). The next step Faris took was to educate the public, targeting what she saw as a specific at-risk population: “Faris realized that many of the women who needed to know about California’s Safe Haven law—most age 25 or younger—didn’t have a clue that it existed” (Wescott 2002). This focus on young women represents attention to an at-risk class of mothers, teenagers, and draws on stigmatizing teen pregnancy discourses aimed particularly at young, low-income girls, and girls of color (see Tapia 2011, 91–108). Drawing attention to hidden pregnancy as a risk of infant abandonment, the Garden of Angels distributed a particularly stark video that aired in California in 2007.15 It begins with a black and white ultrasound moving image and the sound of a heartbeat, with a woman in a hard voice asking, “Are you hiding the fact that you are pregnant?” Answered by an unseen woman, “Yes.” “Do you have a choice?” “Yes?” with a worry-filled voice is the answer, and a large banging noise is followed by a black screen with white letters, “Dump your new born baby in a . . . then flashes images of a dumpster, garbage cans, toilet, the ocean, a garbage heap and a black screen with all capital, white, large letters that reads, “NO.” A kinder voice informs viewers about the California safe haven law, with a “no questions asked” message emphasized. The last frame is the logo and contact information for Garden of Angels, with the sound of children laughing in the background. The meaning is clear: babies who are saved grow up to be happy and playful. This video provides far more visual images than other videos of the unsafe places babies have been or could be abandoned, and is particularly hard-hitting in its format, sounds, and screen messages. The voice

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of the woman hiding her pregnancy is tentative, and her plaintive “Yes?” demonstrates that she is not sure if she has any choices about what to do with an unwanted newborn. The language of choice links to the antiabortion movement’s pubic display of ultrasound images; however, abortion is not explicitly referred to in this video. In fact, the opening ultrasound image precludes the choice of abortion by showing a babysized fetus and thus, a pregnancy past the time limit for a legal abortion. This video teaches viewers about the sites where newborns have been abandoned, and represents hidden pregnancy as a widespread problem that needs to be addressed by all viewers. In the early stages of Garden of Angels’ organization, Faris felt called specifically to provide a voice for abandoned babies. When attending court for the arraignment of a 21-year-old woman charged with strangling the baby she gave birth to alone and leaving her body in a trash bin, Faris responded to what she saw as an unfair silence around the baby’s life. People magazine intones, Two years ago, for example, she was present for the arraignment of the mother of an infant named Leilani, who had been found strangled and left in a trash bin. The mother, a 21-year-old college honors student charged with murder, child abuse and endangerment, eventually accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to five years in prison. “When I was in that courtroom nobody mentioned the baby,” says Faris, who sees herself as an advocate. “The only woman they mentioned was the mother. I represent the child.” (Schindehette and Hannah 2000)

Debi Faris, like Children of Hope’s Tim Jaccard, reports that she transitioned away from focusing only on babies to focusing attention as well to women and their well-being, including the possibility that mothers themselves could be saved, symbolically or practically (from prison or from a life of emotional pain). This progression, from a focus on the death of newborns to the girls and women who abandon them, follows the antiabortion crisis pregnancy strategy taken up by some activists in the 1990s to shift away from a narrow emphasis on the unborn baby to focus attention on the mother as in need of being saved from the option of abortion (Lee 2003; Oaks 2003a, 2009; Gibbs 2007; Kelly 2012). It is within this context that Faris explicitly underwent a change

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of heart, moving from “nothing but anger toward the young women” who abandoned their newborns to “praying for the mothers instead of cursing them” after discussing her feelings with her pastor (quoted in Schindehette and Hannah 2000). In Reader’s Digest, we are told about a dramatic shift in Faris’s attention to “understanding mothers” highlighted in response to the same college honors student in the case discussed above: Faris yearned to understand how a desperate young woman might feel her only option is a Dumpster. One mother, she learned, was a college honor student from a loving family, away from home for the first time. She gave birth in her dorm room, wrapped the baby in a T-shirt and put it down the trash chute. Faris attended the young woman’s court hearings and now visits her in prison, where she is serving five years. “I just wish she had been able to tell someone” [Faris said]. (Wescott 2002)

As depicted in the public service ad, the premise here is that women’s isolation and concealment of pregnancy is the key problem, and that telling someone would prevent infant abandonment.16 However, fear of moral social judgment underlies many women’s inability to freely express their emotions about unplanned pregnancy, which means that they cannot trust that the help they desire will be offered (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 39–67). Faris is dedicated to the promise of safe havens allowing all women to know about this option for how to deal with an unwanted pregnancy, and defends women who make use of safe haven sites. Discussing a case in which a woman surrendered a newborn at an El Monte, California emergency room before safe haven laws were implemented, Faris claimed, “people were outraged that a mother could abandon her baby like that . . . and I was outraged they didn’t see that she had cared enough to leave her child in a safe place” (Wescott 2002). This dichotomy supports safe haven advocates’ main argument: bad women and girls abandon babies unsafely (that is, they “choose death”) and good women and girls abandon babies safely (by “choosing life”). This framing implies that a woman can have proper maternal feelings about her newborn, but at the same time she does not care enough to raise the child. The parallel to antiabortion discourse is clear here: continuing an unwanted pregnancy and surrendering the baby to adoptive

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parents is the choose life/good option to the abortion choose death/bad option. Within this framework there is little room for compassion for women and girls who choose death, illustrating the struggle some advocates have with caring about both babies and the women who gave birth to them. Faris does both in a published story about her relationship with a woman who was drug-addicted at the time of childbirth and who abandoned her newborn in a toilet, assuming that he was stillborn. As related in a People magazine article, the woman reportedly left Faris a phone message in 1998, predating safe haven laws, “I know that my baby is buried at the Garden of Angels,” the message said. Faris put together a scrapbook from the infant’s memorial service and returned the mother’s call. The next morning, she found the young woman on a bench at the Garden. “She looked up to me, and she was crying,” Faris recalls. “She said, ‘He died a year ago today.’ The woman was 22 or 23. She had had her hair done, put on makeup and a long skirt with nylons and nice shoes. This was an event for her, to come out and pay her respects to her child. And when she left, she went over and kissed his cross. I hope that she was climbing out of her despair. I hope every mother can come back and find their child at the Garden.” (Schindehette and Hannah 2000)

Faris’s narrative has symbolic strength and promotes the good mother imperative in several ways. First, it appears that the young woman did not face criminal charges as the result of this incident and knew about the Garden of Angels. Second, Faris created a scrapbook to memorialize the dead infant, paralleling baby pictures kept by caring, good mothers. Third, she describes the woman’s appearance in the cemetery as proper for a memorial event, and observes the woman expressing maternal love, symbolized by kissing the cross and weeping. It is not specified what sort of emotional comfort this might provide for every mother who has their child buried in the Garden of Angels, or why only mothers would benefit from this action. The article also implies that all women who have abandoned a baby would feel ongoing despair, perhaps peaking on the anniversary of the baby’s death; this may or may not be the case. Faris herself gains emotional

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comfort from this symbolic reunification of mother and child, and the narrative functions to reintroduce this woman into a community within which her identity as a mother remains sacred, even following her baby’s death and abandonment. Although infant death and abandonment is an intolerable outcome, Faris and others ultimately aim to prevent death and promote responsible motherhood through safe haven laws.

The Layered Meanings of Actions to Save Babies Children of Hope and Garden of Angels stand out among newborn abandonment prevention organizations because they were established before safe haven laws and reveal connections between their activities, antiabortion discourses, and crisis pregnancy center strategies. Other advocacy organizations formed to explicitly advocate for safe haven laws after 1999, when Texas’s safe haven law was debated and passed. These organizations cover counties, states, or regions, continuing to provide outreach and visibility explicitly for safe haven laws. The division of work between the advocacy groups tends to follow pro-life movement “streams” (Munson 2009); some advocates focus mainly on individual outreach, while others focus on safe haven legislation. Munson found that the pro-life “organizations in one stream are seldom involved in activities outside the stream” (2009, 121); however, within the small newborn abandonment prevention field, organizations including Children of Hope and Garden of Angels participate in both individual outreach and legislation. This may reflect an understanding of the problem (woman abandons baby) as having a clear solution (provide a safe way to abandon), as well as a difference in the scope of the problem: many more women face abortion decisions than contemplate abandonment. At a broader level, infant abandonment prevention advocates share a worldview with antiabortion outreach workers. They seek to intervene in women’s decisions in order to save babies (born or unborn), measuring success by each innocent baby saved. In this view, action must also be taken when babies cannot be saved. Even when a baby’s body cannot be saved, its soul can be. The symbolic burial rituals that some baby abandonment prevention advocates organize run parallel to pro-life me-

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morials for fetal remains, demonstrating that individuals’ lives within and beyond the womb are sacred and should be recognized as such by an assembled family and local community, as well as by our society more generally. The healing of society writ large at these burial ceremonies is also an aim of the activities and philosophies of Children of Hope, Garden of Angels, and other similar organizations. Dumped babies represent a social breach, and pregnant women who may unsafely abandon their babies represent a threat to individual infants as well as to the meaning of motherhood. When activists dissuade a pregnant woman from the unsafe disposal of a baby, resulting in an adoption via a safe haven, the woman emerges as a good mother and the baby is placed in a good family. The social fabric remains whole. These goals and actions are not inherently antiwoman or antiabortion, and I do not criticize the sincerity of the individual outreach that these activists conduct. Indeed, safe haven legislation was brought to states by antiabortion and pro-choice aligned legislators alike, and, in some states, was voted on unanimously (see Iancu 2010). But at the same time, the promotion of safe haven laws should not distract us from attention to the fact that there are actions outside the purview of safe haven laws that can and do provide care for infants and fetuses, and do so without an antiabortion stance. States, counties, and nonprofit organizations, the most prominent being Planned Parenthood, emphasize sexual and reproductive health education and counseling to prevent unwanted pregnancies, which is the first step to preventing the abandonment of newborns. Indeed, understanding the complex circumstances of women’s sexual and reproductive lives and how experiences are shaped by unequal social stratification is central to a reproductive justice view of the issues surrounding safe haven laws. Next we move to examine more closely representations of pregnant women who cope with “unwanted newborns,” as seen in infant abandonment prevention advocacy, safe haven legal advocacy, and media coverage of women who have abandoned or safely surrendered newborns. As Sanger argues, safe haven laws encourage “a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children” (2006, 808–09). We will see how advocates’ targeting of teenagers and school-age populations advances this surveillance structure.

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Girls at Risk of Dumping Their Newborns Are you hiding your baby? Don’t panic. There is a Safe Place for Newborns —Posters in high school girls’ restrooms in Madison, Wisconsin (Ostrom 2001)

Safe haven advocates celebrated success when each state adopted a safe haven law, and yet the existence of the laws did not mean that people had knowledge of them. Proponents formed state, regional, and national safe haven advocacy networks with an aim to inform all girls and women about baby safe haven laws, where to find safe haven sites, and how to use them legally to relinquish an infant. The website of the National Safe Haven Alliance, the first link provided in a Google search for “baby safe haven,” provides this information for every state, and addresses female readers specifically: “Are you pregnant? Have questions about how Baby Safe Haven laws can help you?” (n.d.a). In all but a few states, safe haven legislation passed without a budget provision for publicity campaigns. Thus in many places, the promotion of safe havens has depended on nonprofit organizations funded through private donations and government allocations through health and human services sources. The lack of funding attached to safe haven laws was not a legislative oversight, and was a strategic political move to better ensure that legislation would be passed (see Appell 2002a; Sanger 2006, 792; Iancu 2010). Responding to this funding challenge, the laws’ advocates developed a variety of public awareness strategies. Texas proponents gained access to national media outlets immediately after the first safe haven law passed, appearing in 1999 to 2000 on the Montel Williams Show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN’s Crossfire, and NBC’s Dateline (Bahadur 2000). Safe haven supporters used the media to promote multiple aims: to introduce the 1999 Texas law as trendsetting, to inspire safe haven advocates in other states, to sound the alarm that 75

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there was a widespread problem of baby abandonment, and to educate the public about the perceived need for safe haven laws. In a number of states—both Democrat and Republican—safe haven advocates successfully lobbied policymakers to mandate baby safe haven education in public school curricula, relying on already budgeted resources. Currently, the sponsors of safe haven publicity campaigns vary by place. Posters, flyers, public service announcements, billboards, bus sideboards, bumper stickers, websites, Facebook sites, MySpace sites, and YouTube videos get the word out through campaigns run by state and county agencies, hospitals, and nonprofit safe haven organizations.1 The most comprehensive source for information on safe haven sites is the National Safe Haven Alliance’s website (n.d.a).2 Campaigns promoting the use of safe haven sites suggest that many girls and women contemplate unsafely abandoning their newborns and depict those who take this drastic step in severely negative terms (Sanger 2006; Flavin 2009; Hammond, Miller, and Griffin 2010). Safe haven awareness efforts serve as society-wide education opportunities, emphasizing that both hidden pregnancy and dumpster babies are social problems and offering safe haven relinquishment as the solution. The National Safe Haven Alliance website media page, for example, focuses on each individual’s power and responsibility to save a baby: “You can help save lives. Please take a moment to watch and listen [to a promotional video], then pass the link along to your friends” (n.d.h). Other advocacy messages appeal directly to at-risk women and girls. For example, Wisconsin’s Safe Place for Newborns website states, “No one knew you were pregnant. Now you have a baby and you don’t know what to do. Don’t panic. There is a safe place for your newborn” (n.d.). As we have seen, this safe haven discourse parallels crisis pregnancy messages even though abortion is not directly referred to. Infant abandonment prevention and antiabortion advocates share a central goal: saving babies. Analysis of safe haven awareness campaigns illuminates that a main safe haven advocacy message is that the power women have to give life or cause death itself is a social problem in need of remedy. In safe haven education discourses, the solution is to direct “dangerous” pregnant girls and women, often represented as young, low-income, or women of color, to relinquish their unwanted newborns at safe haven sites instead

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of choosing abortion or unsafe infant abandonment. The solution safe haven laws themselves offer is not counseling, postpartum medical services, or parenting support, all of which could assist a woman in a time of distress; and, as we have seen, some safe haven organizations aim to provide resources outside of what is mandated in safe haven laws.3 The socially acceptable safe haven solution to an unplanned pregnancy creates the image of a good mother as one who carries her pregnancy to term and anonymously surrenders her newborn. In this way, safe haven proponents avoid undermining the message that all women naturally love their babies, which would destabilize the cultural assumption that love is the central component of motherhood. Safe haven laws provide women and girls with the opportunity to relinquish motherhood anonymously in an act that is represented as acquiescing to high expectations of what a mother does and is. Symbolically, a safe haven mother admits that someone else will be a better mother, and offers a gift of a beloved, innocent newborn. To analyze safe haven awareness campaign videos and public service announcements using a reproductive justice approach, we must look at who is represented in safe haven education campaigns as at risk for illegal, unsafe infant abandonment and whether she is represented as a good or bad mother. It is also useful to examine how advocates get the word out through school-based safe haven education, spreading messages about the abandonment threat that teenagers pose to their newborns. We saw earlier that safe haven advocates’ targeting of specific types of future mothers with publicity both reflects and supports the stratification of reproduction in the United States whereby some girls’ and women’s motherhood and parenting practices are lauded and supported by legal and medical institutions, while others’ motherhood is disparaged on the basis of age, class, race, immigration status, and other social categories and life experiences. Yet this narrow targeting is not always visible, because safe haven advocates rely on two overlapping framings of their target audience: most specifically teenagers, and broadly, all women and girls capable of being pregnant. The character of the desperate teenager who conceals or denies her pregnancy, gives birth unattended, and might dump her newborn was a prominent feature of rhetoric surrounding the passage of state safe haven laws. In New Jersey, Democrat and State Assemblywoman Joan

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Quigley borrowed directly from campaigns to prevent teenage pregnancy, stressing the social problem of “children having children” (see Tapia 2005; Garcia 2012): “Most of these mothers are children themselves, and at the moment of delivery they’re alone and they panic . . . We’re certainly not encouraging people to give away their babies. But the alternative is just unthinkable” (“Emergency Room Without Fear of Arrest, Except in Cases of Abuse” 2006). In the Houston area, early safe haven efforts are described as “targeting poor pregnant teens, the group believed responsible for most baby abandonments” (Associated Press 2000). During heated debates in Tennessee in 2001, Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry, a black Democrat from Memphis who had advocated on behalf of many child welfare bills, dramatically argued that the young women targeted for safe haven use were incapable of making appropriate decisions: “I can just 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 bounds of morality where evil is good and good is evil” (Locker 2001). The flipping of good and evil seems to refer to the belief that all mothers should love their newborns unconditionally, and that legal permission for a mother to relinquish her baby without consequences is evil. The threat of teenage women—particularly seen as single, low-income, or of color—taking baby-threatening action signified to advocates the need for safe haven laws as alternatives to unsafe abandonment. The dumpster itself often was used as a shorthand for all abandonment locations, conjuring the treatment of a newborn by irresponsible mothers as disposable trash. A Tennessee news story bluntly states that the law is aimed at teen-age mothers, and quotes Democratic State Representative Billy Broomfield’s support: “We want the young ladies to know you don’t have to wrap (babies) up in ungodly things and throw them in Dumpsters” (Straziuso 2001). Proposing new safe haven education and awareness efforts, a Mesquite, Texas, city council member attempted with creativity to relieve himself from being haunted by the idea that the scope of the abandoned-baby problem is larger than we can know because “what we don’t hear about is the ones that aren’t found” (Tarpley, quoted in Anderson 2003). Seeing the problem as one caused by teenagers and immigrants, he wanted to reach high school students

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and those who “don’t speak English.” He envisioned doing so by putting safe haven signs on dumpsters: “We could develop some kind of international symbol . . . We would like to start a trend for other cities throughout the state and even the country” (Anderson 2003). Repeated in these safe haven discourses is the message that if safe haven laws are known, individuals (teens, Mexican immigrants) who otherwise would have caused a newborn to die in a dumpster will protect life via a safe haven site. The legal consequences are heightened for those who do not safely relinquish a newborn, no matter the reason. As Alabama Governor Bob Riley explained in his support of the law, “too often, we hear tragic stories about infants who die because a scared and desperate parent abandons them all alone in an unsafe place. Being young or scared is no excuse to abandon a baby, and our safe haven law provides an option to parents who feel they have none” (Associated Press 2007b). One year after the safe haven law passed in Florida, a stringent application of the law backed up the safe haven alternative: It was a desperate bid to avoid angering her parents that drove a 15-year-old girl to stuff her newborn baby in a plastic garbage bag, then heave him over a backyard fence, she told police. Now she faces an even stiffer penalty than her parents’ wrath—adult prison time. Lake Worth police on Wednesday charged the 10th-grader with aggravated child abuse, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison. Now being processed as a juvenile, she is likely to be charged as an adult. . . . [Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer] said, “children should be made aware that there is a solution to their problem other than a black plastic bag.” (Brochu 2001)

The disparities in how we might judge the actions of a teenager are stark in this case: this tenth-grader was tried as an adult at the same time that the state attorney warned that children need to know about safe haven laws. Her childish fears about her parents’ anger if they discovered her pregnancy (making visible her sexual activity) and her status as a legal minor were dismissed. Instead, she was seen as having the same decision-making power as a rational adult. This elevation of rationality runs against what sociologist Kristin Luker argues: “Teenage

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mothers often get pregnant because they aren’t being rational actors who put self first—they may have sex to please a man, and they may fail to use contraception because the man either actively objects or makes it difficult by complaining that a condom reduces his pleasure” (1997 5). This variability in part explains why the sentencing of girls and women for neonaticide (death of a newborn) is “wildly disparate” across the United States (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 172; Flavin 2009; see also Kramar 2005 on Canada). Criminal charges and sentences depend on the framing of girls as victims or aggressors; the proclivities of prosecutors, judges, and juries; and political factors such as racism, classism, and state officials’ debates over the death penalty (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 172–73). News stories about neonaticide routinely include information about safe haven laws, urging readers to see only two possible outcomes: “no questions asked” and a live baby, or a criminal investigation due to a dead baby. Teen pregnancy itself is politicized and stigmatized as a social problem, while at the same time experts observe that its incidence is decreasing: as of 2010, the birth rate for teenagers reached an historic low across all ethnic groups (Hamilton and Ventura 2012). On its “Teen Pregnancy” website page, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hypothesizes that these declines reflect decreased teenage sexual activity and the increased use of contraception among sexually active teens. Although safe haven lobbying efforts and awareness campaigns have centered primarily on teens, safe haven advocates admit that this targeted attention does not reflect fully the reality of who relinquishes their newborns at safe havens.4 In an interview with safe haven organization founder Mike Morrisey, he noted that “The women who turn to Baby Safe Haven New England come from all walks of life and range in age from 12 to 40 years old, although . . . the average age is 19 to 22” (Mayer-Hohdahl 2007). A New Jersey social services spokesman admitted, “a lot of people assume it’s only a teenage pregnancy problem . . . We have found it’s really not. When we have information on the mother, we’ve found that both unsafe abandonments and Safe Havens tend to have a pretty wide range of ages, from teens to women in their late 30s who have other children at home. We kind of had to broaden the outreach” (L. Cohen 2006). The hesitance of this language (“we kind of had to”) suggests a reluctance to disengage baby safe haven advocacy from teen pregnancy, which makes

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sense give that teen pregnancy has held such high visibility as a social problem. The organization that coordinates Florida’s safe haven awareness campaigns, A Safe Haven for Newborns, more pointedly argues that infant abandonment is a society-wide—not a teenaged—problem on its “Need for a Safe Haven” webpage: “The generally accepted stereotype of a person who abandons a newborn child is that of a teenage, underprivileged mother. However, our experience indicates that this is a tragedy that crosses all categories of age, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Therefore, [abandonment is] affecting all of society” (2013b). This twofold framing—poor teens/all teens and women—to describe who might unsafely abandon a newborn contains diverse, even contradictory, associations and judgments about good and bad mothers. An extensive feminist literature demonstrates that who constitutes a good or bad mother differs by age, race/ethnicity, class, nationality, ability, sexual identity, and other lived experiences.5 A set of associations linked to entrenched political discourses underlies the teenage, underprivileged mother stereotype. Labeled in the 1990s as “welfare queens,” unmarried, low-income pregnant teens are stigmatized, instructed not to become mothers, and not trusted if they do become mothers. The characterization of the teen mom as low-income connects to inequalities based on race and immigration that are linked to social judgments about whose reproduction is valued in the United States and whose is not. Reproductive justice activists highlight how the unequal legal and medical treatment of mothers and potential mothers is rooted in ageism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant discrimination. When the social context of a teenager’s lack of desire to be a mother is considered, one possible outcome is that her vulnerability and her dearth of emotional resources is viewed as not her fault: she may be an innocent victim of her unwanted pregnancy or unmarried circumstances. An op-ed in a Massachusetts newspaper in 2002 during legislative debates about a safe haven law offers this sympathetic characterization: “The parent who abandons a newborn is usually a teenage girl who is desperate, and unprepared emotionally for a newborn. She is too traumatized by her unwanted pregnancy to weigh her options or comprehend the consequences of her actions. She sees the disposal of the newborn as the solution to her problems” (“Safe-Haven Legislation a Life Saver for Newborns” 2002). This depiction suggests that the innocent or ignorant

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teen is incapable of logical thinking under duress, lacks social support, and is left on her own to solve the problem of having a newborn with whom she cannot cope. A consequence of safe haven discourses is that teens are represented as unable to control or have knowledge of their reproductive bodies (unsafe sex or pregnancy denial), but also are portrayed as able to give birth unattended and reach a safe haven site (or, in some states, call emergency services to pick up the newborn). Sociologist Khiara Bridges’s ethnography of a New York City hospital’s women’s health clinic offers insight into how contradictory images of pregnant women can be deployed at the same time. Clinic staff simultaneously view low-income women of color as “wily” manipulators of the health care and welfare systems for their own advantage and also as supremely ignorant (2011, 211). This analysis can be extended to the figure of the innocent teenage safe haven mom, who is represented by advocates as strong, able, and resourceful enough to give birth alone and deliver an unharmed, healthy newborn to a safe haven site, but due to her age is not trusted with contraceptive information, the decision to have sex, or mothering a child. This latter perspective is best demonstrated by abstinence-onlyuntil-marriage programs. However, with high visibility in safe haven discourses, the representation of the teen’s ability to give birth alone runs counter to vehement opposition to legal home-birthing even when home birth is attended by a trained professional (Murphy-Lawless 1999; Edwards 2005; Block 2008; Craven 2010; Gálvez 2011). Tangled racist and classist ideologies work together to treat some reproductive bodies as biologically able to give birth easily without feeling intense pain (see Roberts 1999; Martin 2001; Bridges 2011). The perception that teenagers will give birth to healthy babies without pregnancy or childbirth care runs counter to mainstream messages instructing pregnant women to follow medical instructions or else risk the health of their newborns (see Rapp 1999; Layne 2002; Block 2008; Landsman 2008; Craven 2010; Gálvez 2011; Moorhead 2013).6 Turning to the other side of the twofold (poor teens/all teens and women) characterization of safe haven users, what are the consequences for identifying all girls and women as potential newborn abandoners who need to be educated to use safe havens instead? Women beyond their teens, or women who have children already and choose to relin-

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quish a newborn anonymously even though they could opt to mother, may not be seen in the same sympathetic light made possible by framing teens as traumatized victims. Through age, experience, or resources, they represent a character who should “know better” than to carry an unwanted pregnancy only to give the baby away without having arranged an adoption. However, to promote the use of safe havens by girls and women in all walks of life, advocates need to uphold the image that both unmarried teenagers and married women who are already mothers are enacting a good mother practice based on maternal love by relinquishing a newborn at a safe haven. This positive representation of relinquishing motherhood as a loving act has the effect of teaching women and girls that it is socially acceptable to simultaneously love a newborn and surrender it to be raised by an adoptive family. Once this logic is established, it seems to follow that girls and women who do not use safe havens are lacking proper maternal love; they abandon their newborns without caring for them. Safe haven advocates offer an alternative way of seeing the problem of infant abandonment that consolidates assumptions about maternal love as universal. Advocates argue that ignorance of safe haven laws drives abandonment, and claim that if girls and women know about baby safe havens, they will find and use a safe haven relinquishment site.7 The assumption that more safe haven education is important to end unsafe newborn abandonment is reiterated in news accounts that promote safe haven campaigns in the face of continued abandonments. A Palm Beach County news story reported on a safe haven media campaign launched one year after Florida’s safe haven policy was implemented, stating, “health and social service workers say the law isn’t working. At least 11 babies statewide have been discarded since the law took effect July 1, 2000” (Associated Press 2001b). The story goes on to quote officials who assign blame to “kids” who discard their “children,” establishing that kids having children is the first problem and their ignorance of safe haven laws is a correlate: “‘It’s really unfortunate that despite this law, my office is still prosecuting kids for throwing their children down the trash’” (Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer, quoted in Associated Press 2001b). A large Texas safe haven awareness campaign was mobilized in 2000 in reaction to the realization that no infants had been surrendered at a safe haven site in the 10

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months after the law took effect (Prince 2000). An op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman complained, “you shouldn’t have to tell parents not to toss their babies in trash cans, hide them in bushes or abandon them in hospital emergency rooms. But towering billboards throughout Houston carry that message [“Don’t abandon your baby!”] after a record 13 infants were discarded like yesterday’s newspaper . . . Most were the offspring of frightened teen-agers who didn’t feel they could talk to their parents” (“The Wrong Medium” 2000). But improving parent–teenager communication about pregnancy or teaching about how to avoid unwanted pregnancy did not become subjects of media campaigns. Indeed, entrenched social stigma around parents addressing their adolescents’ sexual activity as well as abstinence-only education work against this approach (Luker 2007; Doan and Williams 2008; Fields 2008; Jaworski 2009; Romo et al. 2010; Romo, Nadeem, and Kouyoumdjian 2010; Elliott 2012). Bypassing the complex roots of the problem of discarded infants, spreading knowledge about the law was touted as the best solution. David Dewhurst, the Republican Texas land commissioner at the time who became the lieutenant governor in 2003, “reached into his own pockets to pay for the taping of public service announcements in English and Spanish. He will reach even deeper, spending more than $100,000 to pay television stations in metropolitan areas to air those 30-second announcements,” with the expectation that the stations, in turn, would show the public service announcements (PSAs) twice as many times as contracted (Prince 2000). Texas’s “Baby Moses Safe Haven Law PSA” is posted on YouTube and uses the wrong/right juxtaposition strategy, showing a frantic young woman with dark hair and brown skin, wearing jeans and a black shirt, carrying close to her shoulder a light-skinned infant wrapped in a yellow blanket. In the “wrong” component of the video she opens a dumpster, and the camera shows a soiled black and white stuffed animal rabbit symbolizing the infant who would be placed there. Particularly given her brown Latina skin, this image invites an analysis of the link between “breeding like rabbits,” young women’s irresponsible reproduction, and immigration politics (see Chavez 2004, 2008; Gutiérrez 2008; López 2008; Kluchin 2009; Bridges 2011; Gálvez 2011; Garcia 2012; Braff 2013). In the “right” version of the video, the frantic woman walks to a fire station where she hands the infant to a white male fire fighter, with no

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words exchanged. The video teaches both that infant abandonment is a risk, and that even women filled with maternal love and in distress can do the right thing by relinquishing an infant at a safe haven.

Teenagers in Trouble in Safe Haven Awareness Campaigns A key contention of this book is that safe haven awareness messages elide the social injustices that can make motherhood more challenging for some, while perpetuating negative stereotypes of other women as being likely to be bad parents. As we have seen, particularly harsh motherhood judgments are made about women of color, immigrants, teens, and those who have difficult socioeconomic backgrounds. One demonstration of these messages is seen clearly in dramatic safe haven advocacy materials. A popular strategy in education campaigns follows the formula used in the Texas Baby Moses Safe Haven public service announcement, which first emphasizes the reality that some newborns may be killed or abandoned, thus establishing a problem. This is followed by information on how to prevent this tragedy by using a safe haven site. The dumpster is established as the primary symbol of unsafe abandonment and the teenager, acting alone and distressed, as the main character. The dumpster symbol appeared first in legislators’ speeches about safe haven laws, and is carried through to education videos to raise awareness. Some safe haven videos are designed for use in classrooms and school assemblies, yet others use language and graphics that would not be admissible in a school setting. The videos show the same conflicting depictions of pregnant teenagers discussed above: they are simultaneously strong and resourceful, yet also innocent and ignorant. These safe haven dramatizations of a teenager’s experience reduce her problem to being one of getting rid of the baby when her problems could be numerous, including giving birth alone, an absent father of the child, a dysfunctional family, a mistrust of authorities, and the need for postpartum medical and counseling care. Overlooking these complexities, safe haven education materials focus on the message that if teenagers who are “in trouble” know about safe havens, they will use them. “Georgia’s Story,” an edgy two-and-a-half-minute video produced by Baby Safe Haven LA (Los Angeles) and available on YouTube, offers one

A safe haven site at a Santa Barbara County Fire Station in California. Credit: Rachel Rys.

The doorbell options at this fire station do not include a specific button for a safe haven relinquishment. The Spanish mission style door invokes church-based infant surrenders of centuries ago. Credit: Rachel Rys. 86

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The California safe haven logo and text in Spanish and English, indicating an effort to target diverse women and girls. Credit: Rachel Rys.

of the most graphic portrayals of a teenager’s experience of giving birth alone and the distress leading her to either a dumpster or a fire station safe haven site. Georgia is portrayed as a young white woman with short dark hair and a pierced lip, signaling a youth culture affiliation. Her student status is indicated by her conventional school uniform: a skirt, knee socks, and white button-up shirt. She carries a backpack through a crowded train station, puts her hand over her stomach, and quickly heads to the bathroom. As she first enters, there are at least three women present, but then it becomes a seemingly empty (and soundproof) bathroom, with the hustle and bustle of the train station still going on. She locks the door to a stall and loudly moans, crying, “Oh my God, what is that? Oh my God” as she gives birth on the floor. When the newborn cries, she screams, “What the fuck is that? Shut up!” while she sits next to the bloodied toilet holding her head with her white school uniform shirt, hands, arms, and legs spattered with blood. A struggle between two internal voices is dramatized while the newborn continues to cry with its own distress. Her realization, “Shit, that’s a baby” is countered with her rocking back and forth holding her knees

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to her chest in a shocked trance, shaking her head and repeating calmly, “It’s not, it’s not mine.” Georgia’s rational voice says that she should get help by calling her mom or go to a hospital or to a firehouse. As the newborn’s cries become more insistent, she tosses textbooks out of her backpack, calling out in her irrational voice, “It’s not real, it’s not real,” and stuffs the newborn in her pack. The scene cuts to Georgia standing outside the train station, now wearing a disguise of a large sunglasses and a baseball hat. The fiction of this drama is revealed when we see she has a clean shirt and no visible blood on her hands, arms, or legs. She carries the quiet backpack in her arms and looks around as if someone is searching for her. Georgia comes to a row of black trash cans, then approaches an open, shiny white dumpster, which symbolizes a coffin. Looking around furtively and with no emotion on her face, she throws the backpack in and walks away without looking back while the newborn cries. The crime is committed, and the infant’s death seems inevitable. After a moment focused on the backpack in the dumpster, the action is rewound back to the birth scene to provide the acceptable alternative to Georgia’s problem of bearing a newborn alone without a plan for what to do next. In this version, modeling what a girl should do after giving birth alone, Georgia, again wearing the dark sunglasses and cap, carries the whimpering infant wrapped in her black jacket awkwardly in her arms. She walks on urban sidewalks until she sees a Safe Surrender Site sign at a fire station. Georgia stands in front of the building, and immediately a white female firefighter comes out to the sidewalk to meet her. She looks at the baby, then at the firefighter, roughly placing the newborn in her arms uttering only, “please.” The firefighter cradles the infant, saying only “thank you,” with a bit of a question implied, while the young woman rubs her arms in a sort of self-embrace, then walks, head up, down the sidewalk with her arms crossed over her chest. We see then a faint blood stain at the bottom of her white shirt. Words appear on the screen: “Life is hard enough for one . . . Don’t make it impossible for two.” The screen goes black, and then displays the LA motto: “No Shame. No Blame. No Names.” A MySpace site for Georgia’s story and BabySafeLA.org are both advertised. This video is one of the few that expresses the inner thoughts of a teenager who gives birth alone, and her shock and denial explain to

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viewers her reasons for dumping the newborn. The depiction dramatizes reports from some girls and women about their pregnancy denial and dissociation from the baby, meaning that they do not see it as their baby or they see the baby as an adversary (Meyer and Oberman 2001; Smithey 2001; Vallone and Huffman 2003; Davenport, Flynn, and Shaw 2007; Oberman and Meyer 2008). It is implied that all teens would know where to find a dumpster, and Georgia, perhaps due to her shock, shows no emotion or care for the newborn in the backpack. Although childbirth is represented as painful and she lost a good deal of blood, she has the physical stamina to walk the city streets. Revealing her lack of clear thought, Georgia left her textbooks in the bloody restroom stall, which likely would make it easy to find her to start a criminal investigation. These conflicting messages underscore her innocence and surprise, but the scenes also display her strength and resourcefulness. In the safe haven relinquishment component of the video, Georgia’s emotional distress remains, but she has the presence of mind and knowledge of safe havens to walk to a fire station. When the baby is placed into the firefighter’s arms, the safe haven goal is met. I cannot be the only viewer of this video who has wondered why the firefighter did not directly ask Georgia if she was all right, put a hand on her shoulder, or, in line with California law, give her medical and family history paperwork. Any of these actions would still uphold the “No Shame. No Blame. No Name” promise of Baby Safe Haven LA. The lack of attention Georgia received while giving birth in a public bathroom detected by no one continues even after she does the right thing by relinquishing the newborn unharmed. She is represented as independent, strong, and healthy enough to give birth and then walk to the safe haven fire station (in the video, her clothes are miraculously clean following the bloody birth scene). A concluding voiceover comments on why girls and women should make use of baby safe havens: “Life is hard enough for one . . . Don’t make it impossible for two.” This recognizes that a hidden pregnancy and unsupported birth is “hard,” and perhaps even acknowledges that life will continue to be hard for Georgia because she must cope with having lived through this traumatic experience. It also underscores the message that it would be impossible for Georgia to raise the baby herself, which, it is implied, is her fault for making bad choices. An alternative view would fault a society in

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which teenage pregnancy is stigmatized and sexual education and support for reproductive autonomy is suppressed. But Georgia’s pregnancy denial and unattended birth experience is vindicated because she saved two lives, protecting her newborn from her own potentially murderous emotions and protecting herself from criminal charges. Advocacy of safe havens suggests that given knowledge of an alternative to the dumpster, girls and women, no matter their distress levels, can act on basic maternal nature and safely relinquish a newborn. The message that concealed pregnancy leading to newborn abandonment could happen in a middle-class white home is dramatized in a three-minute public service announcement distributed by AMT Children of Hope (2007e) and posted on YouTube (“Safe Haven Baby New York”). The video opens in grey tones, focused on a young light-skinned woman with short dark hair and brown eyes looking distressed and touching her stomach through the baggy sweatshirt she wears, sitting at the kitchen table in a middle-class home. Her mother, dressed for work, is busy in the kitchen, and the two fight about whether the daughter will go to school. As emotion-filled piano music plays (“Journey” by pop singer-songwriter Samantha Cole), the mother implores, “Just tell me what’s going on,” which is met with the daughter’s combative, “Nothing. I’m not going to school. Leave me alone,” as she leaves the room. The next frame shows her sitting on the toilet in tears with labor pain. The mother, a “Happy Valentine’s Day” poster on a door visible behind her and signaling a home that celebrates love, is worried, knocking on the bathroom door and asking, “Honey, are you okay in there?” The irritable daughter yells, “Just go away!” and the mother reluctantly leaves the house for work. The daughter moans in pain; the screen is filled with an image of a newborn crying and then the calm, blank face of the young woman. The scene moves to a sidewalk, the camera focused on a large dumpster and the young woman walking toward it, closely holding the baby bundled in a green towel. She wears the same clean clothing (even her white pants do not get bloodied), and looks tired and bewildered while the camera follows her gaze down to the newborn, who looks up at her calmly. The teen continues on, walking through puddles and past empty industrial-looking sites. When she reaches a dumpster, she looks around to see if anyone is watching, then carefully lays the infant in it. The cam-

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era shows the newborn looking up again. The teen walks away, holding her arms across her body where the baby had been, and crosses a road just as a garbage truck turns the corner, honking a warning to get out of the way. She pulls her red jacket closer, and looks up at the side of the truck, which features a safe haven poster showing a white, shirtless father playfully holding an infant in the air. The woman pauses, then runs through the alley puddles back toward the dumpster, racing to get there before the garbage truck does. Similar to Georgia, this young woman is independent and has the energy to walk around an urban area just after giving birth, but she is represented as not thinking clearly when she resorts to a dumpster. The video cuts to Samantha Cole, standing on a picturesque park bridge and advising, “If you just had an unwanted baby, don’t panic.” She provides information about New York Safe Haven Laws and AMT Children of Hope’s services while the background shows the young woman retrieving her newborn from the dumpster, smiling and hugging it close with relief, and then dialing the Children of Hope hotline at a pay phone. The final screen provides the organization’s name, website, and hotline number. The young woman is at first represented as defiant—she will not let her mother help her—and after giving birth alone she is dazed, but also touched, by the newborn looking up at her. When she saves her own baby from the dumpster she holds it tenderly, implying that unlike Georgia in the Baby Safe Haven LA video, she has natural feelings of maternal love. She goes on, motivated by this love, to call Children of Hope for assistance with a safe haven. Given the unlikelihood that this public service announcement will reach many viewers at the time of their crisis, the message “If you just had an unwanted baby, don’t panic” is awkward. The work the ad does attempts to raise public awareness by all viewers about teenagers who hide their pregnancies and potentially abandon them. The corrective scenario still features the teenage woman shunning her mother and giving birth her baby alone, but she then acts in a model way by contacting Children of Hope for assistance with her unwanted, but precious newborn. In line with this unspoken idea, the question of why a teen is relinquishing her newborn is not directly raised in safe haven messages. The cause of teens’ resorting to abandonment or safe haven relinquishment,

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these videos imply, is a combination of concealed pregnancy, fear, shock, poor family communication, lack of resources, and, overwhelmingly, isolation at a time when support is needed most: childbirth. The commonsense assumption conveyed is that a teenager would opt not to parent, playing into stigma, and even restigmatizing teenage motherhood. Further, absent from these safe haven awareness videos is any attention to the medical or psychological needs that a teenager would need after giving birth and relinquishing a baby without anyone’s knowledge. The no-questions-asked part of safe haven laws is meant to signal that a criminal investigation will not be pursued and the mother will not need to give her name. However, this also extends to no-questions-asked about the safe haven mother’s needs or well-being. In safe haven advocacy messages, the moment when a mother relinquishes her child may be one of emotional distress, but it is also a moment to be experienced alone. A Florida public service announcement distributed by A Safe Haven for Newborns (n.d.b) and posted on its website news and media section also avoids the question of why—beyond maternal duty—a young woman relinquishes a newborn she loves though it recognizes that relinquishment is emotional. With ominous music in the background, the PSA presents a young Latina woman with long black wavy hair wearing all black (symbolizing mourning) and slowly walking toward a brightly lit fire station at night saying to herself in a raspy, emotion-filled voice, “My baby, always remember that I do love you.” With an emotion-filled face, she looks down at the infant then hands the swaddled bundle to a Latino fireman who looks her in the eye but says nothing, and, with a look of concern, stares at her as she walks away. This representation of the woman’s inner thought suggests relinquishment as an act of love committed by a self-sacrificing mother for her newborn. The loving young woman who leaves her baby at a safe haven is thus depicted as a good mother—or at least as doing what a good mother should, even though it is a painful sacrifice for her. Despite this attempt to portray a mother as doing the right thing by avoiding unsafe abandonment, there are wide gaps between this representation of maternal love motivating safe haven relinquishment and the stereotype of a teenaged mother at risk of dumping her infant. If a young woman hid her pregnancy, gave birth alone, did not want to raise the

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baby, and had no other resource beyond a safe haven, why would she be saying with longing, “my baby, always remember that I do love you”? Do women who leave newborns in unsafe places hate their babies? Or, as the Baby Safe Haven LA video featuring high school student Georgia suggests, do they unnaturally feel that the baby is not even theirs? The “my baby” phrasing of this Latina woman’s inner thoughts educates the audience to have compassion for her self-sacrifice and communicates to girls and women that you can both love and relinquish your newborn. It urges a woman in crisis to anonymously relinquish her baby with the hope that the newborn will carry with it natural, caring, maternal feelings. Ultimately, these videos communicate that a mother with antimaternal, shocked, or numb feelings can do the right thing by surrendering her newborn at a safe haven, but most desirable is a mother expressing maternal love to her own baby as she surrenders her or him. This representation creates a sense that every baby is precious and loved, instilling responsibility on all childbearing women to prioritize the welfare of their infants, and emphasizing the moral rightness of honoring life over death. We have seen elements of this perspective in how infant burial organizations draw attention to the innocence of all infants and how infant abandonment prevention advocacy messages reinforce antiabortion messages. Nine seconds into the 38-second Florida video, as images of babies fill the screen, the authoritative voice of the well-known Latina Miami newscaster Jackie Nespral breaks in to reinforce the value of the safe haven baby, attesting: “A baby is such a precious gift”—in this case, the viewer must keep in mind, not to the mother, but to the adoption market—“that’s why A Safe Haven for Newborns is leading the way in Florida to save lives” (A Safe Haven For Newborns n.d.b). This framing helps explain the love for and relinquishment of the safe haven baby: the woman provides her (unharmed) infant the gift of life and also provides the baby as a gift to an unknown adoptive family. The video’s background replays images of the woman’s sad face looking at her baby and the firefighter taking it into the building, walking past a sign posted with the A Safe Haven for Newborns logo. Nespral intones, “Baby abandonment is a tragedy that does not have to happen,” and invites viewers to visit the safe haven website linked to the NBC website, “to learn more about how you can help to save lives.” With this institutional backing

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of the Miami mainstream media, the Florida safe haven organization aimed to educate the public and raise money to support its efforts to publicize the state’s safe haven policy. The choice of a young Latina character can be interpreted in several ways. Miami has a large Latino population, which could legitimize this message targeting a Latino audience. The emphasis on maternal selfsacrifice could also be tailored to this audience in keeping with both racialized and Catholic notions about the importance of children and family for Latinas’ sense of self (see Browner 2001; Hirsch 2003; Garcia 2012). A different reading, however, is that the Latina woman is coded as an overly reproductive poor immigrant who has more babies than she can support (see Chavez 2008; Gutiérrez 2008; Gálvez 2011), and thus turns to safe haven relinquishment. Other reasons for the surrender could be conjured: that she is a victim, coerced by a man to take this step or, on the other hand, that she is concealing a pregnancy that would not be accepted in her family or community. The viewer is not directed to think about what drove this sad woman to give up the baby she loves and is asked only to celebrate the precious gift. A reproductive justice imperative would instead direct attention to the social context within which she made her decision—for example violence, poverty, lack of family support, mental health problems, and how the provision of material and emotional support could assist her to raise the child herself. At the core of safe haven education is the illustration of teens and young women making the right decision to relinquish a newborn as a way to correct the reality of dumpster babies. Emphasizing the wrong thing to do as it opens, a Minnesota television PSA posted on the Children of Hope website’s media center page shows the image of an infant squealing and wriggling in a towel (AMT Children of Hope 2007f). We then see a young white woman with a blank face and tears on her cheeks looking down at the baby. She closes the lid on a dumpster and turns away. Immediately, a middle-aged white man stands next to the dumpster, cradling the infant. He looks at the young woman and points to a hospital sign, hands the infant back to her, and puts his arm around her shoulders as they walk into a cloud of white light toward the hospital. A voiceover states, “You can leave your baby up to three days old at any hospital in the state” and the website and logo (a calligraphylike drawing of a hand holding a newborn) appears on the screen. In

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this depiction those who know about safe haven sites act as guardian angels, watching over the actions of distressed women to protect their newborns from them. This communicates that anyone—but especially a white paternalistic man—can step in to save an infant by teaching young women to use safe havens instead of dumpsters. In safe haven awareness campaigns only mothers are featured as relinquishers; however, in all but four states either parent can surrender a newborn legally. The laws vary, from those in Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, where only a mother can surrender her newborn, to those in seven states (Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Vermont) where the law does not specify who can legally surrender a baby (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2010). The emphasis in safe haven advocacy on women surrendering their newborns allows the viewer to avoid the topics of baby-napping or coercion of women by others, and positions women and girls as the ultimate decision-makers about their infant’s future. If only mothers are seen as relinquishing newborns, safe havens are supported: mothers, represented as caring naturally about their infant’s well-being, demonstrate that it is possible and laudable to relinquish motherhood. This is particularly emphasized in the video depictions of teenagers acting alone and responsibly: if even a distressed teen can properly use a safe haven, every distressed mother should be able to do so.

Mothers Who Might Abandon Their Newborns Are Everywhere? Advocates for safe haven laws and for the use of safe haven sites assume that there is a compelling need for a surrender option for pregnant women. That every state has passed a safe haven law implies that infant abandonment is a risk everywhere, and thus constant vigilance must be widespread. Rather than moving stigma away from teenagers as at risk of infant abandonment, all women of reproductive age are framed as possible newborn abandoners. A Texas district attorney notes, however, that infant abandonment is not evenly distributed in our society while at the same time justifying ubiquitous safe haven policies: Though infant abandonment cases are rare in Orange County [Texas], District Attorney John Kimbrough said, the risk posed to unwanted in-

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fants’ safety is too great to ignore. . . . “Child abandonment isn’t a widespread problem here. We certainly see a lot less of it in Orange County than in Houston or Beaumont,” said Kimbrough. “But we want to prevent all instances of it, because just one case could lead to an infant’s death.” (Pedersen 2001)

The not-so-hidden assumption is that fewer infants will be unsafely abandoned in affluent, predominantly white residential areas.8 This framing of the problem supports the idea that impoverished women are more likely to abandon an infant unsafely, but also leaves the door open to the potential reality that abandonment happens in an affluent region. In other words, although the problem is not evenly distributed, the risk is everywhere present, and therefore widespread surveillance and education is necessary. This suggests that all women, no matter their social situation, and even someone you know, should be seen as a possible threat to a newborn. This message is clearly delivered during a 15-minute Nebraska radio program and interview with Mike Morrisey, a vocal safe haven advocate based in Massachusetts and founder of Baby Safe Haven New England. The program is posted on the Children of Hope’s website in its media center (AMT Children of Hope 2007g). Morrisey was lobbying for Nebraska, one of the few hold-out states at that time, to pass a safe haven law (Nebraska did so in 2008, with unusual consequences). One DJ, Scott, explains that a woman described as white, in her early twenties or late teens with shoulder-length brown hair, entered a Nebraska hospital with a basket, went into a bathroom, then left without the basket. A newborn boy less than eight pounds was found. After giving the woman’s profile, Scott jokes with his DJ counterpart, “Lucy, this sounds like you.” She laughs a bit and, playing along, says with wonder, “It does.” He continues the joke, “just be glad this isn’t the first day back after that two week exodus you took earlier this summer,” and the two discuss a purported rumor that Scott had started about Lucy having had “medical issues” which led to people ask Lucy, “how’s the baby?” upon her return to work. Scott returns to the original news story, stating that the woman who left the infant in the hospital restroom was wearing a short-sleeve white T-shirt and blue pants. He directs Lucy: “Stand up . . . that’s what you’re wearing.” “Oh, just stop!” she chides, repeating stop several times. Scott

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notes that the mother who abandoned the baby is sought by police and will be thrown in jail, but that in most other states, safe havens allow legal drop-offs at hospitals. He explains, “you can drop it off and drive away and go to Burger King and enjoy the rest of your life and not worry about a thing.” In this flippant way, Scott simultaneously raises the issue of suspecting women, including one’s coworkers, who fit the description of a woman who abandoned a baby and provides a callous representation of the feelings of women who relinquish infants at safe havens. This strategy may attract listeners and encourage pregnancy policing; it does not urge compassion for women. Continuing the theme of suspicion about women who hide their pregnancies from friends, coworkers, and family members, gaining weight for nine months then suddenly losing it, Scott asks, “do they try and go about their lives like nothing happened?” Morrisey replies that it is not dissimilar from a woman who does not want to be pregnant and goes “into an adoption plan.” The difference he points out is that some women deny their pregnancy even to themselves. With authority, Morrisey reports that trends in loose clothing facilitate hiding pregnancies, and that women who are 5’4” to 5’5” and 110 to 115 pounds “are the ones who hide their pregnancies the best.” After providing this specific information to use for profiling devious pregnant women (which corresponds with weight-height averages for a 15-year-old American girl; see Paventi 2011) the DJ Scott responds, “You’re kidding me . . . that’s about how much Lucy weighs,” and Morrisey steps in to say, “Aw, come on, leave Lucy alone.” Morrisey’s defense of Lucy puts an end to the joking attitude about the serious issue of who conceals a pregnancy and, therefore, who may abandon a newborn. A different radio show also raised the issue of whether abandonment is a society-wide or a teenage issue. Cape Cod Community College students designed a multimedia project to raise awareness of baby safe haven policies. Representing Baby Safe Haven New England, they offered a local radio station a contract so that the station would be the first to receive breaking news about safe haven stories in exchange for a weekly announcement of the organization’s hotline number posted on Children of Hope’s media center (AMT Children of Hope 2007h.) The DJ, Suzanne Tonaire, enthusiastically agrees to the contract that the students ask her to sign (she agrees to “sign it twice!”) and urges listeners

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to “spread the word” about baby safe haven laws. Tonaire states that she “checked up” about the women who relinquish newborns, and thoughtfully questions the stereotype of teenagers as being at greatest risk of abandoning a newborn. She tells the listeners, “if you know of a young adult, a teen, or even, I was checking up a little bit about baby safe haven, and some of the women that have actually surrendered their babies are not so much teenagers, because they are actually women in their 20s . . . who might not want the baby.” Tonaire takes issue with the stereotypical representation of a teenager who abandons a baby, and by recognizing that other women also experience unwanted pregnancy, broadens the scope of appropriate safe haven outreach to reflect the reality that age may not be the main determinant of a woman’s reaction to pregnancy. This discussion acknowledges that nonstereotypical safe haven moms also have social contexts that lead them to relinquish their newborns, which safe haven advocates have been forced to recognize. An alternative way of analyzing this depiction, however, would focus on how the DJ broadens the scope of the perceived social problem of pregnancy denial and newborn abandonment, in line with safe haven advocates who worry that pregnant women and girls are everywhere and may endanger their newborns or fetuses. This highlights an effect of safe haven laws, as legal scholar Carol Sanger emphasizes: the law “encourages a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children” (2006, 808– 09). Safe haven advocates may see this as a natural, benign, or desired outcome, and insist in practical terms that knowledge of states’ laws must be widespread in order for women and girls to use safe haven surrender sites. This belief underwrites advocates’ strategy to provide safe haven education in public schools, where future generations of young people may learn about the threat of infant abandonment and how to prevent it.

Public Education about “Private” Acts: Safe Haven Advocacy in Schools Drawing on both accounts of who is most at risk of unsafely abandoning a baby—teenagers or all girls and women—safe haven advocates have lobbied for mandated safe haven education in public schools with varying degrees of success. In Alabama, a politically conservative state,

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public high schools received 300,000 pamphlets to publicize the state’s safe haven law (Associated Press 2007b). In Tennessee the safe haven law was passed in 2001, but proposals to require education in schools failed. In 2007 a bill was altered to urge, but not mandate, that public schools inform students about the law in grades 9 through 12 (Associated Press 2007a). Like other such organizations, A Secret Safe Place for Newborns in Tennessee provides speakers for school and other group events, and has a PowerPoint presentation available at their website. Although safe haven advocates’ education materials are geared to preteen and teenagers, safe haven education in schools is not limited to teenagers; since 2002 in California and 2003 in Illinois, the sexuality education code stipulates that safe haven laws be taught in K through 12 public schools’ curricula.9 These states have particularly vocal safe haven advocates and governments that have taken strong positions on solving the teenage pregnancy problem and providing school-based sexuality education (see also Irvine 2004; Luker 1997; Tapia 2005; Doan and Williams 2008; Fields 2008; Garcia 2012). Teaching in schools about safe haven laws potentially raises sensitive issues around consensual and forced sex, contraception, pregnancy and birth, family support, mental health, and proposals for mandated safe haven education have not been easily accepted in all public schools. In defense of their belief that safe haven laws should be taught in schools, however, a primary safe haven advocacy message is that education of children and teenagers is a practical antidote to the social ill of baby abandonment. A mother of an 11-year-old son supports this view in a letter to the Dallas Morning News: I am not surprised that women are unaware of this law. I think we need to make it a part of our middle school and high school curricula. It seems to me that we could save a lot of babies and a lot of young women from ruining their lives by spending an hour discussing the consequences of abandoning a child in an inappropriate place . . . I’d love to see these things discussed in the schools. It’s such a shame to see these babies abandoned in trashcans. (Owen 2006)

Reiterating the call for safe haven education in schools, the Facebook page of Safe Place for Newborns of Wisconsin featured comments

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reacting to a story about a 16-year-old girl who buried her stillborn newborn in a flowerbed after keeping his body in her nightstand for one week. One was emphatic: “More info needs to get into schools— high schools and middle schools, rural and urban! What a terribly sad circumstance!” This post was followed by a frustrated Safe Place for Newborns of Wisconsin reply that attempts to rally the readers with, “Now if only we can get the schools to agree!” Thus some schools, or school boards, are seen as barriers. Safe haven proponents in the state of Washington faced rejection of their school-based education efforts, as a news story dramatically reported, “they have offered pamphlets and speakers to every high school and college in the region. Thirty-six districts in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. And, in the past year, five schools have invited them to speak. Five. Even the supposedly enlightened University of Washington sniffed that it didn’t need this kind of information ‘because it doesn’t have that problem’” (Paynter 2004). That schools are not rushing to take advantage of safe haven education underscores that not everyone shares the same assumptions that advocates do: such education is necessary and appropriate, and the absence of it threatens the lives of newborns. In other places, safe haven advocacy organizations have reached schools by offering presentations and distributing teacher kits and direct videos for classroom use to facilitate compliance of state education laws and to get their own message out. Advocates also conduct school-based presentations and distribute posters, flyers, and videos at private schools. Classrooms may seem like an unlikely site for safe haven advocates to enter, given that sex ed is one of the most politicized components of education (Irvine 2004; Luker 2007; Doan and Williams 2008; Fields 2008; Garcia 2012). Since the 1990s sexuality education has been a battleground, fought between advocates of comprehensive sexuality education (ageappropriate and medically accurate information about sex, sexual expression, and contraception, including abstinence) and abstinence-only education (a morality-driven curriculum that questions the effectiveness of contraceptives and argues that sex outside of marriage is wrong). The design and distribution of prepackaged abstinence-only teaching materials are often created by conservative and religious pro-family organizations such as Focus on the Family (LeClair 2006, 291; Doan and Williams 2008, 94–95) and backed by federal funding streams to

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promote this central dimension of the conservative pro-family movement (Luker 2007, 223). The 1981 Adolescent Family Life Act started this process a decade before it took root; the act redirected federal funding away from comprehensive sex education agencies to pro-family organizations (Luker 2007, 222; Doan and Williams 2008). Abstinence-only education received increased funding in 1996 through welfare reform as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and a Maternal and Child Health block grant administered through the Department of Health and Human Services. In the mid2000s Congress appropriated nearly $1 billion for abstinence-only education, with no money supporting comprehensive sexuality education; through this route, organizations with an antiabortion philosophy have received more than $26 million (LeClair 2006, 291). Safe haven laws were passed in this abstinence-only context, although more recently the Obama administration approved federal funding in 2010 for teen pregnancy prevention programs, which shifts the sex education focus away from privileging the abstinence-only message above all others. This background provides clues to explain why safe haven education is seen by some states as a feasible fit with school-based health and sex ed. Safe haven advocates follow the model of a prepackaged curriculum, and in several ways safe haven, abstinence-only, antiabortion, and pro-family messages are in agreement. Feminist scholars argue that a set of traditional, heterosexual gender values and a regard for sexuality as dangerous and in need of constant individual moral control are central components of abstinence-only education (Irvine 2004; LeClair 2006; Luker 2007; Fields 2008; Garcia 2012). Sexuality education is also racialized, as sociologist Lorena Garcia documents in her ethnography Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself (2012); Latina teenagers shared stories about how their teachers and sex educators treat them as potential bad girls who will live up to the stereotype of the low-income teenage mother (see also Doan and Williams 2008; Fields 2008). Safe haven education is immersed in these gendered, racialized, and classed messages about girls and sexuality, and supports the premise that sex is dangerous because it can lead to unwanted pregnancy. But it also goes a drastic step further to announce that sex can result in pregnancy denial and newborn abandonment. Also in line with abstinence-only education themes, safe haven messages emphasize that young women can and

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should make responsible, individual decisions about pregnancy. Boys and men have little to no role in safe haven education materials, which reinforces the idea that men do not abandon babies, but they do abandon vulnerable women. As we have seen, safe haven advocacy organizations support antiabortion philosophies and the pro-adoption stance of safe haven advocates, which also fits with pro-family views. Yet even in states where abstinence-only education is dominant the inclusion of safe haven education in schools has been debated, and in some places, blocked. A Michigan school official explained, “schools are concentrating on abstinence education and there is no coordinated effort among them to keep the [safe haven law] information available” (Deiters 2004). The sticking point? Safe haven laws, some voices argue, encourage sex— which undermines the teaching of moral, abstinence-only values—by offering a consequence-free pregnancy outcome. The tension between abstinence-only (sex should not happen) and safe haven (sex does happen) education is highlighted in comments posted on the National Safe Haven Alliance’s Facebook page (n.d.g). The Alliance posted a story about a baby in California abandoned in a store’s trash can in December 2011. Commenting on this event, Diane Terlato Graci writes, “I’m just so disturbed by the girls who are so afraid to tell anyone they are pregnant that they would resort to killing a baby— whether it’s abortion or worse—putting it in the trash. How can you hear a baby cry and then do that? There has to be a way to teach them there’s Safe Haven Laws without telling them it’s ok to have sex” (emphasis added). Joanne Terlato Savarese (perhaps a relative; they share the same middle name) replies to that post, saying, Absolutely! I agree on that one. Maybe the approach should be we need to respect our bodies and how we let others treat it as well. ABOVE all a complete respect for life needs to be the attitude. I cant see giving these kids all the tools they need to make such adult decisions. Why not give them a drivers license and let them drink at 11. Thats when the sex ed classes start. (National Safe Haven Alliance n.d.g, all emphasis and usage in original)

These statements point out that school-based education about safe haven laws raises the issue of teenagers having sex, and, in Savarese’s view, the

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decision to have sex is as adult as driving and drinking, both of which have legal age requirements. Graci’s view that abortion or baby dumping occur when teens are afraid to disclose their pregnancies and her suggestion that instilling the value of “a complete respect for life” connects directly to antiabortion perspectives. These comments symbolize the heated politics around what constitutes appropriate sex education in schools (Irvine 2004; LeClair 2006; Luker 2007; Doan and Williams 2008; Fields 2008), demonstrating that there are social-political reasons why inclusion of education may be opposed. Legal scholar Carol Sanger’s incisive analysis of safe haven laws’ cultural effects suggests that abstinence-only education and the demonization of abortion facilitate girls’ pregnancy denial (2006, 815). Girls cannot admit the “moral failure” of having had sex and lack the skills to cope with being pregnant when “above all” (in Savarese’s words) they were taught that abstinence is the only action that respects life. Further, there are serious practical and legal constraints on girls under 18 to seek abortion care, which include parental notification laws, punitive judicial bypass procedures, long travel distances to clinics, and waiting periods between counseling and the procedure (see Sanger 2004; Silverstein 2009). The outcome is that abstinence-only education supports restrictions in teens’ lives that may lead them to feel a need to conceal their pregnancies and then relinquish their newborns at safe haven sites. As the executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, Kim Gandy, argued about safe haven advocates in 2000 when safe haven laws were debated across the country, “in their eyes, she’s a bad person who didn’t practice abstinence and probably isn’t a fit parent anyway” (quoted in Sevcik 2000, 36). In other words, abstinence-only education helps to produce the concealed teenage pregnancy problem, and then safe haven advocacy reduces the problem to one of saving babies—indeed, saving babies from their own mothers. Care and concern about the teenager’s experiences, desires, and needs is absent from the discussion. School students are desirable audiences for safe haven advocates who seek to reach teenage girls directly and spread knowledge of safe havens as a reasonable, normal alternative to unwanted pregnancy, one that works also to prevent abortion. Infant abandonment prevention advocates are generally dissatisfied with public awareness of safe haven laws and sites despite the available array of public service announcements,

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billboards, TV news features, YouTube videos and radio programs, and Internet sites that publicize them. The proof of inadequate education often cited is that newborns continue to be abandoned unsafely. In a scholarly article that is mainly critical of safe haven laws, criminal justice scholars Hammond, Miller, and Griffin determine that safe haven education and identifying at-risk girls and women are positive actions: If SHLs [safe haven laws] are to be effective, they must be known. The school system may play an integral role in informing teenagers that legal abandonment through SHLs is an option. Medical professionals may also educate at-risk women. Although this may encourage women to prematurely abandon children in a panic, later to regret the decision, it may also encourage legal abandonment rather than infanticide. (2010, 551)

This logic implies that targeting specific populations of girls and women is justified. How would medical professionals determine who is at risk for unsafe infant abandonment? In any event, the stereotypical safe haven user is a young woman who hides her pregnancy and avoids medical care. Further, the suggestion that a woman might regret her use of a safe haven and wish to reclaim her baby is important, and yet there is short window that safe havens allow for the process of reclaiming a safe haven baby; indeed, only 20 states have such a window at all.10 The National Safe Haven Alliance contends, “it’s rare that a mother changes her mind,” which may represent reality—but also it could be true that a mother may change her mind but feel powerless to take action, believing that the safe haven arrangement is permanent, or not having the resources to initiate the necessary proceedings (n.d.a). The broader effect of singling out teens and women who lack resources as at risk for unsafe abandonment and as appropriate targets for safe haven education supports surveillance and stigma along racial and class lines. While some girls and women are framed as potentially bad mothers due to age, financial circumstance, or family background, the social structures that create ageism, poverty, and fragile families go unaddressed. Analyzing safe haven advocacy organization websites and news media stories on education efforts offers insight into how these issues are carried in school-based safe haven messages. The ability of safe haven advocacy organizations to reach students also depends on their

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local networks. Miami-based A Safe Haven for Newborns has ties to the Archdiocese of Miami, one of the first endorsers of the safe haven law in Florida. In 2007 the Florida Conference of Bishops, working with the safe haven organization, implemented a 45- to 50-minute curriculum in all Catholic high schools in Florida. The group also gives presentations in public schools and hands out information about the organization (personal e-mail communication, January 25, 2013), and sponsors contests for middle and high school students to create a winning safe haven awareness video. The contest serves several purposes: it can provide peer-to-peer education, a format that other teens are attracted to, and encourage research and promotion of safe havens. The school-based curriculum includes role plays and screens a video geared to middle and high school students that directs students to counsel their friends about safe havens, and states that students should ideally seek guidance from their families or teachers and turn to A Safe Haven for Newborns as the absolute last resort while also distributing the organization’s hotline number (A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.d). This strategy suggests a defensive stance, speaking back to parents who would not approve of their children calling a hotline before confiding in them. The 10-minute, 30-second “Did you know?” video, posted on Florida’s A Safe Haven for Newborns website (and now available as a DVD), demonstrates that the education strategy is threefold: to introduce the safe haven law, to argue that unsafe abandonment is a real problem, and to encourage teenagers in crisis to reach out to others or call the organization’s hotline. The video begins with the words of a white woman whose expert knowledge is legitimated by her nurses’ uniform, stating, “We want to share some very important information with you. It not only could save the life of a newborn, but would protect the future of their mother and father as well”; the safe haven toll-free number appears at the bottom of the screen. The video turns to a reenactment, with a scene in a living room where a high school-age Latina woman with long, straight light-brown hair and dark brown eyes appears distressed, anxiously dialing her cell phone and waiting for an answer. A couch pillow she sits next to reads “Daniela.” She reaches her boyfriend, Nick, and asks him to find a quite place to talk because she has “really important” news. Stammering, she states, “Listen, um, I don’t know how to say this, but . . . I’m pregnant.” Nick apparently asks her several times if she’s sure,

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and Daniela tells him she took a pregnancy test after feeling different physically and emotionally. Nick seems still not to believe it, and hangs up on her. Daniela weeps, hugging her pillow. Time moves forward, and Daniela answers the phone; her friend Jacquie is checking up on her because Daniela’s been cutting class, leading the viewer to understand that Daniela is a student who lives at home. Daniela protests “she’s just been very busy,” but then discloses her pregnancy to her friend, admitting, “I don’t know what to do. You know I can’t tell my mom . . . or my dad. The thing is, I don’t want them to be disappointed in me, or embarrassed. I don’t want to be embarrassed.” These feelings may be shared by a wide range of teens, and they could be referencing Daniela’s Latino family’s expectations of her (see Garcia 2012). Jacquie recommends that Daniela see a counselor or someone at her church, and Daniela seems relieved to have this advice. Daniela listens, then says, “Safe haven? What’s that? [pause] Oh, you know, I think I’ve heard of it. I, well, I saw this sign outside a fire station; it’s got a phone number on it.” Sounding more upbeat, Daniela tells her friend while counting on her fingers, “I got it: church, parents, counselor, safe haven. I’m gonna get the help I need.” She puts down the phone and hugs the pillow, but does not cry. This segment of the video emphasizes that friends should have information about what to do in crisis pregnancy situations, and publicizes several options. The order of the options signals the positioning as proper advisors to a young pregnant woman as first religious authorities, second parents, third a mental health professional, and, as a last resort, a safe haven agency. In this depiction, like other safe haven advocacy videos, the distressed teen is rational enough to seek help and understand safe haven laws, and thus is resilient and independent in ways that overestimate the capabilities of many teenagers in a time of crisis. At the same time, the video reproduces the stereotype of the ignorant and isolated pregnant teen who is incapable of being a good mother due to her age, race, or socially isolated circumstances. This sets up a depiction of adoption as being the pregnant teen’s best option. Following the successful education of Daniela about the range of resources offered to her, the video abruptly shifts to a Miami newscast that provides details about what may happen when a pregnant woman has an unwanted newborn with no support. A woman reports while a

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camera shows, in dramatic black and white, the shadowy movements of an investigation by police of a newborn found in a backpack, the body decomposed to the extent that they could not tell its gender or age. The 11-year-old white boy who found the backpack while fishing is interviewed, stating that he opened the backpack and found a baby blanket, within which was a Walmart bag, within which was “a baby that was all swollen up from being inside the water.” The scene shifts to a young black woman who holds a bundled newborn on her shoulder, being asked to comment on a case in which a newborn girl was dumped in a large, round, black trash can, “leaving her for dead.” This young black mother calmly contends, “she could’ve put the baby up for adoption or even take[n] it to the hospital, and you wouldn’t be asked questions. But now there’s charges and everything . . . [she shakes her head and pats her baby]. She took the wrong way out, that’s for sure.” This mother, despite being young and black (a combination rarely upheld as a representing who a “good mother” is), provides a model for what the other woman should have done: she took the best path, raising her beloved baby, and she also knows about adoption and hospital safe havens options. Unanswered questions linger: why would any woman need a way out of motherhood, and why do some take the wrong way out? News footage shows investigators going into an apartment and removing a trash can, telling us that Stephanie Smith is “charged with the attempted murder of her own daughter.” The video moves to a screen featuring the baby safe haven toll-free number and a white man wearing an emergency medical services (EMS) or firefighter’s uniform stating with an authoritative tone, “What you just saw does not have to happen because there is a Florida law which now allows a mother or a father to leave a newborn in safety at a safe haven.” A black man wearing a dark police uniform and the white nurse who introduced the video give more information about the law. Although the attempted murder charge signals that the baby lived, the video does not explain that Smith’s twohour-old, white newborn girl was found alive in the trash can, which would demonstrate that unsafe abandonment does not always lead to infant death (Rondeaux 2002). To emphasize that pregnant teens who are afraid to ask for help from others may face criminal penalties as a result, the video shifts to a clip from the TV talk show Montel. A dark screen flashes an ultrasound

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image, a baby crying, and lightning while a woman we cannot see tells of her pregnancy at age 19 and hiding it from everyone with baggy clothes and little weight gain. She hid her pregnancy from her mother, with whom she shared a home, but was too scared to talk to about the pregnancy. A montage of quick-moving images shows a house, a bathroom, and a woman rubbing her bare, pale, pregnant belly. The young woman’s voice trembles as she admits, “It’s been very hard. I think about it every day. I was almost eight months pregnant when I gave birth.” The viewer is told that Mary’s baby died on the bathroom floor and was found in a plastic container in her car, which was parked in a hospital parking lot. Words on the screen indicate that Mary is performing court-ordered community service for Florida’s A Safe Haven for Newborns organization, and that she has the task of advocating for safe havens by “sharing her message to help other young girls who are hiding their pregnancies.” This phrasing implies that in any group of teens, some are hiding their pregnancies and may cause their newborns to die. Mary reveals in a low, flat voice, “I will everyday for the rest of my life be affected by my decisions.” This video segment stresses the remorse that this young woman feels, and urges others to avoid this fate. Presenting a foil to Mary’s life course, the safe haven video returns to the reenactment, as Daniela thanks her friend on the phone, telling her that she made the call and is getting the help she needs. She even smiles a little a bit, indicating that things have turned for the better. In the final segment of the video, the EMS/fire officer urges viewers to go to the Safe Haven for Newborns website and promotes the 24-hour, confidential, multilingual help line: “Remember, no one will judge you. Everyone will be helped. Your life is important, and so is your baby’s.” These few, carefully chosen phrases address the fear that women may have about disclosing unwanted pregnancy and focus on the message that properly handling an unwanted newborn helps not only the baby, but the woman herself. Despite the assertion that “no one will judge you,” most safe haven advocates represent teenagers as unfit to raise a child—and, further, firmly judge as wrong the decision to unsafely abandon an infant. This logic chain represents common sense to many viewers, because no one advocates infant abandonment and many feel that teens are too young to be proper parents. However, a shift to a reproductive justice perspective would make clear that many issues are left out of this depiction of the

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problem of teenage pregnancy. The issues that are important in women’s lives include sexual consent, contraception, abortion, relationships, and family communication; further, it is a reality that some teens wish to raise their children and need support to do so (see Nathanson 1991; Harris 1996; Doan and Williams 2008; Garcia 2012). “Did you Know?” is screened in Florida Catholic schools’ freshman pregnancy education classes and taught by a health teacher, as reported by Miami’s CBS station and linked to A Safe Haven for Newborn’s website (A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.a). The news story includes interviews with some of the Catholic students who received safe haven lessons. A black student identified as Garrett Smith approves of the teaching, admitting that “I have known people . . . and have family members that have went through some situations like this,” racializing the topic and avoiding clarification of what he refers to: Unwanted pregnancy? Abandonment? Infant death? A white student states that teenage friends have divulged only to her that they were pregnant, and Nick Silverio, the founder of the safe haven organization, shakes his head while reluctantly stating, “there are pregnant girls everywhere. And, um, there are pregnant girls in Catholic schools, contrary to people’s belief.” This acknowledgment that Catholic parents and teachers may be in denial about teenage pregnancy is his defense of inclusion of safe haven education in Catholic schools; Silverio’s aim is to spread safe haven education throughout Florida public schools bolstered by his knowledge that there are pregnant girls everywhere. Silverio is not the only safe haven advocate who envisions the risk of unsafe infant abandonment carried by pregnant girls. Other infant abandonment prevention advocates also attempt to make it easy for teachers to integrate safe haven information into their classrooms. Unlike Florida, California law mandates safe haven education in schools.11 A side effect of safe haven education materials being designed and distributed by a safe haven advocacy group in collaboration with a government agency is a boost in the legitimacy of safe haven organizations. The advocacy organization Garden of Angels explains on its education and resources webpage, In California, Assembly Bill 2817 requires as additional course criteria in public elementary, junior high, and senior high school classes that teach

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about teen pregnancy, sex education, and health, to advise the pupils of the “Safe Surrender for Newborns” law. In developing and providing this advice, school districts and public schools may adopt and use for this purpose appropriate information and materials developed by nonprofit organizations with experience in child abandonment. (Garden of Angels 2014)

The bill modified the education code related to sexual education, and the approval of teaching materials designed by nonprofit organizations parallels the DIY (do it yourself) strategy abstinence-only advocates use to distribute their curricula. The Garden of Angels’ website posts a one-page guide and four-page kit for teachers, which explains in simple terms that the law is meant “to protect newborn babies from being hurt or killed because they were abandoned or thrown-away.” The teacher kit includes tips on creating a classroom environment for the discussion of sensitive issues, provides a poster and student handouts, and suggests that education about safe haven laws should reach outside classroom walls, urging teachers to: Use key excerpts from the SSB [Safe Surrender Baby] Law resources in student bulletins, daily announcements and on your school’s website. Organize an informal “brown bag lunch” discussion for students who wish to talk about the SSB Law together. Involve parents by inviting students to take the SSB Law student handouts home to share with their families. (Garden of Angels n.d.)

In this way, education in schools promotes advocacy beyond the classroom. School-age students are urged to publicize the safe haven law by discussing it not only with their peers, but also with their families. This safe haven education strategy correlates with that used by the evangelical Christian Good News Clubs, advertised as Bible study groups and held at public schools to legitimate and widely distribute fundamentalist evangelical beliefs (Stewart 2012). An example of safe haven education stretching outside of the school is an event in Illinois, a state with an active safe haven advocacy organization that formed in 2000 to both draft and lobby for a safe haven law. Years later, in 2006 and 2007, two suburban Chicago public high school districts hosted a baby

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shower celebration to publicize safe havens, led by student groups urging students and community members to donate baby goods at schools or safe haven designated fire and police stations (Abderholden 2007). This event featured the multiple goals of student leadership, volunteerism, and education about the law, and symbolically represents the baby shower that a girl or woman hiding her pregnancy never has the honor of receiving. Safe haven advocates know that students will have questions about why safe havens are needed, and the teacher’s kit provide answers to potential student questions about the root of the problem. A California “Safely Surrendered Baby Law Teacher Kit” posted on the Garden of Angels’ website predicts that some will ask, “Why do parents abandon babies?”—perhaps with fear that they could have been abandoned, or with confusion about how abandonment and adoption are different. The answers raise a number of family issues, some of which students may be all too familiar with. This education may stigmatize the lived experiences of some while idealizing the lived experiences of others as normal. The brochure explains: Babies have been abandoned for many reasons: • Mother’s husband is not the father • Mother has other children, can’t afford to take care of another • Fear of being abused if discovered • Fear of humiliation from unwed pregnancy • Fear of social services taking her other children • Fear of an ex-spouse taking custody • Fear of telling parents • Pregnancy discovered too late, no alternative of termination • Child is the result of a rape The parents who experienced any of these circumstances have been under severe emotional distress. Because they were afraid and had nowhere to turn for help, they abandoned their babies. (Garden of Angels n.d.)

This approach to understanding the problem of infant abandonment focuses on individuals’ lack of support services, and even extends sympathy for those who have been “afraid and had nowhere to turn for help,”

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sympathy that is not routinely extended to criminal legal cases against women and girls who abandon infants (see Meyer and Oberman 2001; Flavin 2009). Although the hypothetical student’s question is about the role of parents, the answers specifically state or imply that a mother carries the weight of responsibility. Further, individuals in severe emotional distress remain responsible for finding the support they need. As a step in this direction, the teacher kit provides hotline numbers for a range of services including domestic violence, public assistance and food stamps, and child abuse agencies. It concludes with this message from the California Department of Social Services: “Certainly we would prefer that women seek help while they are pregnant, not after giving birth, to receive proper medical care and counseling. But at the same time, we want to assure parents who choose not to keep their baby that they will not go to jail for abandoning their baby to safe hands in a hospital emergency room.” In this way, the state officials admit that safe haven laws are envisioned ideally as a last resort way to resolve a pregnancy crisis. This statement also points out that medical care and counseling is not part of the safe haven law’s provision. The law has benefits for women and girls in the legal—but not the medical—realm for those who have given birth, perhaps hours before they go to a safe haven site after giving birth unassisted at home. The message to students is that the state law can address the distress of parents after the baby arrives, but the responsibility to seek help is left to each individual pregnant girl or woman. A participant in the creation of California’s educational safe haven documents, Garden of Angels-Safe Surrender for Newborns’ founder Debi Faris, also has visited classrooms to get the word out about infant abandonment prevention. A journalist provides this account: On a recent spring morning, a noisy gaggle of ninth graders jams a classroom in Yucaipa. Within minutes, the room goes silent, the students riveted by the woman standing before them. She is talking about birth, life and death—and choices youngsters can make to define them. “Secrets kill,” she says. “I know, because I’ve buried 54 of them. And I’ve learned that one person can make a difference.” Faris continues, “If you tell just one person about this new law, you will have done something important. There are things in life worth standing up for.” (Wescott 2002)

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Faris’s tactic is not to exhort the students to tell others about their unwanted pregnancies—which might open the door to acknowledgment of ninth graders being sexually active—but rather to charge them with spreading the word about safe haven laws. The secret that kills has several meanings: the law is a secret if no one knows about it, a teenager’s secret can be her concealed pregnancy, or the abandonment of an infant can be a secret. The message of the importance of each student telling even just one other person mirrors safe haven advocates’ repeated message that “even if just one baby is saved the law has worked.” Aiming to reach a youth audience, spokesperson and actress Patricia Heaton is featured in the Garden of Angels’ radio public service announcement aired on “high school, college and commercial radio stations across the state” (O’Brien 2004).12 On the other coast, AMT Children of Hope’s Tim Jaccard speaks in schools in the New Jersey–New York region about infant abandonment prevention. Jaccard’s presentation includes attention to sex without consent as a cause of unwanted pregnancy. A recent news report concludes, “to educate people, Jaccard has done multiple speaking engagements including speaking to more than 12,000 high school students in 2010. He goes to high schools and teaches about date rape and acquaintance rape addressing consent to sex” (Rizzi and Hinko 2011). Educating about legal, consensual sex is a laudable goal, yet the messages Jaccard uses could be drawn from abstinence-only education, which would be consistent with his Catholic Church affiliation. Abstinence-only programs teach teenage girls the traditional message that they must not make and must fend off sexual advances from boys and men, with statements including, “Watch what you wear, if you don’t aim to please, don’t aim to tease” and “Because they generally become aroused less easily, females are in a good position to help young men learn balance in relationships by keeping intimacy in perspective” (cited in LeClair 2006, 303; see Doan and Williams 2008, chapter 4). The implications are that unwanted pregnancy is the result of unwanted sex and that teenage girls should not be sexual. This line of thinking may support the denial and concealment of the experience of pregnancy. School-based safe haven education fulfills the aim of safe haven advocates to reach teenagers whom they see as at risk for pregnancy concealment and unsafe infant abandonment, as well as to train young

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people to be watchful for girls and women who are in need of safe haven information. The twofold framing of safe haven education (teens/all women) both builds on the surveillance of teenagers’ sexual activity and the stigmatization of teenage pregnancy as well as widens surveillance to all girls and women due to their power to conceal pregnancy. Safe haven education makes visible that it is a problem when pregnant teens are emotionally distressed and have no where to turn for help. Yet a reproductive framework would see this as a failing of state, community, school, and family support for teens, including comprehensive sexuality education and parenting education. Instead, the safe haven framework turns our focus to the individual failings of the individual teenager, playing into well-established negative teen pregnancy discourses as well as abstinence-only moral judgments about teens’ sexual activity.

Safe Haven Education Attempts to Shape Social Attitudes about Mothers Safe haven advocates argue that spreading knowledge of safe haven laws and making safe haven surrender as convenient and as visible as possible are the keys to reducing unsafe infant abandonment. Perhaps the best example of this tactic is the activism of Children of Hope’s Timothy Jaccard, who spearheaded New York’s Nassau County 2010 Ambulance Signage Program to alert everyone that ambulances are part of the Safe Haven program and that ambulances are legal baby safe haven sites. This publicity, coupled with knowledge about the law, is central to Jaccard’s efforts: “Instead of abandoning their babies to uncertain outcomes, mothers are assured that there is a safe place and that their babies will be adopted and placed in loving homes. Education is the key in changing the minds of these mothers who feel they have nowhere else to turn” (Rizzi and Hinko 2011). The reach of safe haven advocacy into schools is a strategy that may shape the attitudes and actions of generations to come. It also appeals to teenagers today who may find themselves or their friends in trouble with pregnancy and a lack of support for coping with it. The reiteration of education as the primary way to prevent infant abandonment naturalizes this assumption, implying that if everyone knows about the laws, no one will fail to use them. The next chapter explores this contention.

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As we have seen, there are complex social messages communicated in safe haven awareness initiatives—not simply value-free information about the existence of state safe haven laws. Publicity videos, posters, billboards, school curricula, and other education efforts advance visible images of good and bad mothers, promoting narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother. Safe haven advocates’ education attempts are aimed, ultimately, at saving babies from potentially bad mothers who would risk their lives by dumping them. Some women, including teens and impoverished women (often represented as young women, women of color, or immigrant women) are stereotyped as unlikely to be good mothers. Reorienting our attention from these pervasive stereotypes toward working for reproductive and socioeconomic justice would support a different argument, one that seeks to provide all women and girls with the ability to make their own decisions about motherhood and to receive pregnant and parenting resources. But the reality is that the current social and economic climate relentlessly limits women’s motherhood options. The next chapter presents examples of how media coverage of specific safe haven relinquishment cases undergirds assumptions about responsible motherhood while at the same time providing evidence about the pressures in women’s lives that may lead them to seek safe haven surrender sites.

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3

Relinquishing Motherhood How and Why Safe Haven Surrenders Happen

A news report leads in with a fire rescue engineer recalling, “It was a[n] ‘oh my God’ moment, leaving a baby unattended like that,” as the screen shows a handwritten note left with the baby, “Please Find Her a good Home. I’m sorry Thank-you Birthmom Born April 21, 2011 7:15am” and the CNN footer flashes “Safe Haven Baby.”1 The newborn was left at a Florida fire station approximately one hour after her birth, and the hyperenergetic newscaster applauds the birth mother’s actions: “Mom does the right thing. She couldn’t give this baby a home, so she leaves the baby, just an hour old, with that note.” Excitedly, the newscaster informs viewers that there are safe haven programs all over the country that allow “moms to leave babies at hospitals, at fire stations and other places, without fear of any legal consequences.” The story fails to point out that this newborn was not handed to someone at the fire station and was left unattended; thus, the birth mother did not follow the safe haven law. I label this Florida case as one of many near-miss cases containing complexities that are not depicted in safe haven awareness campaigns. This case is framed by the media as being within the spirit of the law, celebrating and not criminalizing the act of the relinquishing mother. Later in the news story, as the screen flashes photos of the fire station along with a statue of a firefighter holding a baby girl, Susan in Maryland offers her view on the value of safe havens: “She could’ve left it in the dumpster, she could’ve ran, you know, she could’ve killed it.” Echoing safe haven advocates, Susan reminds viewers that women have the ability to give life and also represent the main threat to their own newborns. She also fails to ask why the mother deemed her life circumstances to prevent her from raising this child, foreclosing a discussion of the social, economic, and relationship barriers faced by women and girls. 117

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An analysis of individual cases of safe haven relinquishments, the conditions of the surrender (near-miss or in line with the law), and information about the reasons a relinquisher opted for a safe haven reveal that the positive messages in safe haven law awareness campaigns that praise women and girls for making good choices when using safe haven sites fail to address the profoundly unequal resources in individuals’ lives. Taking a reproductive justice approach to the use of safe haven laws highlights the reality that some women and girls may feel coerced by economic, relationship, familial, or other factors to relinquish a newborn at a safe haven site. With the claim that no questions will be asked, safe haven laws are not designed to collect information about women’s or girls’ reasons for surrendering their babies at a safe havens.2 The overriding question that remains unasked and unanswered is: “Why are you opting not to raise your baby?” This compelling question cuts to the heart of assumptions about maternal love, acknowledges that there are diverse complexities in girls’ and women’s lives, and opens the door to advocating reproductive and economic justice that will broaden parenting resources to those who need them. Media coverage of safe haven cases frames for the public a way to understand the practice of safe haven use. By analyzing specific cases reported in the media, including the remarkable case of the use of Nebraska’s original safe haven law by distressed mothers, fathers, and grandparents to relinquish teenagers at safe haven sites, we can see glimpses in media stories and safe haven advocacy materials about how individual women’s decision-making is linked to social politics around age, class, race/ethnicity, education, immigrant status, mental health state, and other salient categories of experience and identification. News stories help to create public understandings about who uses or should use safe havens, and also provide a source of information about how some individual women’s decision-making is overdetermined by social and economic disparities. However, rarely has there been public dialogue about the entrenched social inequalities that drive some women and girls to opt for safe haven relinquishment. Earlier we looked at advocates’ representations of the safe haven mom as a potentially bad mother who does the right thing by relinquishing motherhood. To address the pregnancy and mothering needs of women and girls who lack adequate resources, we must move beyond the sim-

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plistic newborn relinquishment solution to instead seriously consider the limits of safe havens laws as a social-legal fix to unsafe abandonment.

Safe Haven Relinquishment the Right Way Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you do to save the lives of innocent little babies. If I would have had the chance that young girls and women have today with the Florida Safe Haven for Newborns option, I would have saved my baby’s life. There are babies now being fed, rocked and loved today because of everyone associated with the Gloria M. Silverio Foundation—“A Safe Haven for Newborns.” —Anonymous testimonial posted on the organization’s website (A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.c)

The ten-year, state-by-state legal process of establishing the nationwide expectation that women and girls experiencing unwanted pregnancies could and should opt for a safe haven relinquishment instead of unsafe infant abandonment was completed in 2009 when Washington, DC passed a safe haven law. Despite the countrywide coverage of safe haven laws, there is variation in state requirements about the infant’s age, proper safe haven sites, and criminal immunity provisions. Women and girls who seek a safe haven site may find confusing the specifics of the law in their location: billboards, posters, and other public awareness campaigns rely on shorthand explanations of the law and do not communicate details. Baby Safe Haven LA, for example, announces, “No Shame. No Blame. No Names.” How realistic is the expectation that all women and girls who decide to surrender a newborn can access a legal safe haven site and follow advocates’ model of how to enact a relinquishment? Baby Safe Haven New England founder Michael Morrisey frames safe haven laws as a moral and practical solution for a woman in distress: “In many cases, frightened mothers cannot do the right thing. Safe haven is what brings them to the door of the police or fire station or the paramedic or the hospital” (quoted in Shaughnessey 2004). This assumption overstates the ease with which women can find safe haven sites, and leaves open the question of what the right thing is above and beyond surrendering

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a newborn at a safe haven site. Carol Sanger (2006) agrees that safe haven expectations are not always realistic, pointing out a number of logistic problems behind the assumption that safe havens are accessible. This is particularly important when imagining the acts of those seen as most at risk of abandoning a baby, teenagers who conceal their pregnancies: Acting on a Safe Haven decision may not be as easy as the publicity posters suggest. How does a mother get from the locked bathroom in her parents’ house to the Safe Haven without being seen or without the infant being heard? Does she take a bus or subway or borrow the family car? What does she use to transport the baby? Gym bags and backpacks sometimes feature in abandonment stories and while they may seem terribly off-hand, these are the kinds of containers teenagers have. (Sanger 2006, 795)

Sanger notes that some safe haven advocates work to address these challenges, and in a few states, a 911 call for emergency help is recognized as legal. Even with these provisions, it is not hard to imagine a woman or girl’s reluctance to call an ambulance to her home, where onlookers and neighbors would raise questions. In fact, New York has the broadest legal language, explained on the National Safe Haven Alliance website’s New York page as allowing a woman to leave a newborn up to 30 days “with any responsible person at a suitable location in New York” (n.d.d). But the lack of specificity of this broadly worded law itself could raise distrust; for example, how exactly is a woman to identify who is responsible and what a suitable location is within the law? These questions support Sanger’s assertion that “there is little that makes implementing a Safe Haven decision particularly manageable. Its successful use may therefore be a matter of luck” (2006, 795). This conclusion is at odds with the representation of safe haven surrender as a legal and moral imperative. A real-life story posted by a volunteer on the Illinois-based Save Abandoned Babies Foundation website points to another dimension of luck involved in a successful safe haven surrender: the good fortune that a safe haven responder knew how to follow the law.

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I had an experience today I would like to share with everyone! Please feel free to forward this and pass it along. One of my sons wound up in the emergency room this morning. He was treated and recovered in short order. As we were waiting for discharge, a new nurse came in and announced that she was going to complete the paperwork for our discharge. I have to admit that my first reaction was one of impatience. Tired, stressed out, I just wanted to go home. As she was new to us, we had to go back over the basic information, which I did somewhat grudgingly. As she prepared to finish up, I felt that little voice inside nudging me— “Speak to her”—and truth is my response was “Lord, I don’t want to.” However . . . I looked at her and asked “Are you familiar with the Safe Haven Act?” She responded with “I am the nurse that received the Safe Haven baby that was surrendered here.” We both beamed and I said “I am the adoptive parent of this Safe Haven baby right here” and gestured to my daughter [details about when and where the author’s daughter was relinquished are not provided, and she is not the same baby whose story is told]. The nurse told me her story. She said “I will never forget that day. It was pouring rain, and someone had come and left brochures about Safe Haven here in the hospital. I had read one so when the call came, I knew what to do. A woman called that afternoon, saying that she was coming in to give up her baby under the Safe Haven Act. I went outside to meet her and brought the parent information pack and the medical questionnaire sheet. We went under the shelter and I gave her the packet and asked the nursing questions. She answered them, took the pack and handed me her baby. I took the baby and looked at her. She appeared to be about two hours old—still bloody from the birthing process, umbilical cord still attached. And then I opened my arms and hugged the mother. All I could say to her was ‘Thank you for bringing her here and not leaving her somewhere unsafe. Thank you.’ She walked away, and I brought the baby into the hospital where the doctor examined her and certified her healthy. We brought her up to the nursery and her adoptive family was there within a day to visit. I left a necklace my husband had given me with her, some teddy bears and a note for her family.

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A week or so passed, and her adoptive family called me at the hospital. They wanted to know anything they could so that they could share with their daughter as she grew up. I told them that her birthmother had made a brave decision. We have remained in contact since then.” She showed me pictures of this healthy blue eyed little girl and her adoptive family—brother, mother and father. So happy. So right. So safe. I looked at her and said “I know the woman that brought in the brochures. I am the one who asked her to do it.” The nurse said “The brochures were how I knew what to do.” So dear friends—TALK ABOUT IT. TELL A FRIEND. YOU JUST MIGHT SAVE A LIFE! (Save Abandoned Babies Foundation n.d.b)

This advocacy-bolstering story illustrates how a safe haven site should work. The selfless act of the safe haven advocate, who delivered brochures during a rainstorm, began a chain of lucky, positive events. The new nurse had time to read the brochure, and it provided enough information for her to be confident that she could uphold the law. The mother herself had enough information, energy, and forethought to a) know about the safe haven law, and b) call the hospital emergency room before arriving at the hospital within two hours of childbirth. We do not know how she was transported to the hospital, leaving a gap in the birth mother’s story. The nurse receiving the newborn expresses compassion for the baby and the mother, hugging the woman with open arms while holding the baby (this is a remarkable picture, the newborn coming between and joining the two women). The woman who surrendered the infant is not described as having any emotion or need to leave a keepsake, and walks away. The nurse’s heartfelt thanks carry an assumption about the wrong choice that this woman could have made without a safe haven: “Thank you for bringing her here and not leaving her somewhere unsafe. Thank you.” She lauds the birth mother for her brave decision, which seems to downplay the courage of the act of seeking an ER on her own two hours after giving birth. The storyline continues with the baby’s new life and the nurse standing in as the primary person who loved her, with this transfer of maternal love symbolically allowing the baby’s mother to walk away without leaving her unwanted newborn also unloved. An adoptive family is swiftly brought in, and when the infant leaves the

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hospital, she has a family keepsake, toys, and note from the nurse. The nurse even stays in contact with the adoptive family. In these ways, the nurse is the good mother by proxy. The end of the narrative includes information about the newborn’s ethnicity when she refers to her blue eyes—we can presume that she is white. Coupled with her being a newborn with no strings attached to the birth mother, this baby is in the most desired category for US adopters (Roberts 2001; Wozniak 2002; Rothman 2005; Dubinsky 2010; Gailey 2010; Briggs 2012). The infant completes a nuclear family, joining her brother, and the nurse declares, having seen photos, that this family is “happy, right, and safe.” We cannot know what sort of life the birth mother would have provided, and an implication lingers that it may have been sad, wrong, and unsafe. The moral of the story is that safe haven surrenders are positive and worth advocating, as evidenced by the fact that the storyteller, it is revealed, is not only the mother of a safe haven baby but also the one who told the volunteer to drop the brochures off on that rainy day. In other words, if we each do our part, we will save a life, and, by extension create a happy family. This story presents a warm and loving view of what happens when a newborn is surrendered at a safe haven site, and imbues the process with love for the baby extending beyond maternal love. It lays out expectations about both feelings and actions for the woman who surrenders the newborn as well as the first emergency responder and hospital nurses. A closer look at media accounts of babies relinquished at safe havens points to how these high expectations are not always met, and shows that some women’s safe haven surrenders are judged as better than others even though all meet the most basic success criterion laid out by safe haven supporters: saving a baby’s life.

Ideal Safe Haven Use in the News Media coverage of baby safe haven relinquishments often represents the surrender of a newborn as upholding expected or model use of the law and safe haven sites. Such accounts serve as teaching tools for readers, seeking to shape social perspectives about the use of baby safe havens. News coverage of success cases is framed as a rescue of a newborn by the presence of a safe haven law. There is a logical leap that

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underestimates the challenge girls and women may face to travel to a safe haven site that underwrites the assumption made by awareness campaigns we saw earlier: education about safe haven laws will result in their use. That tells only part of the stories women and girls bring, unspoken, to safe havens. A story about a Connecticut Christmas miracle baby emphasizes the importance of education about safe haven laws. The report begins by noting that the baby’s adoptive parents did not even know about safe haven laws or the work that legislators and child advocates put into it (Megan 2009). The story intones, “Hannah Lynn’s birth mother knew about the law, however, and that made all the difference.” Notably, the woman does not fit the age and racial stereotype of who needs to relinquish an infant at a safe haven site. The story states she was in her late thirties and blond, suggesting that she is white. The news coverage features the perspectives of caring emergency room nurses and their feelings about Hannah’s mother and the experience of receiving a safe haven baby, and is worth presenting at length: On Dec. 24, 2007, about an hour before midnight, a blond woman in her late 30s arrived at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford. As nurses and doctors describe it, the woman had in her arms an infant, wrapped in a T-shirt and a towel. The baby was crying and blue from the cold. The mother had delivered the baby herself at her home, tying off the umbilical cord with a rubber band. The mother knew her rights and she wanted to use them: Under the state’s Safe Haven law, she knew she could drop off the baby without being charged or having to answer questions, and that’s what she wanted to do. “She was nervous about what people thought of her bringing in the child,” said Jeannine Laine, an emergency room nurse who attended to the mother and child. Although a mother in this situation need not answer any questions, the hospital staff tries to take a little medical history, if possible. But this mother answered very little, saying only that she had had no prenatal care, did not know who the father was and had taken some allergy medicine during her pregnancy. And then, quickly, as usually happens in Safe Haven cases, the mother vanished, leaving the hospital emergency room staff, accustomed to heart

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attacks, stabbings and shootings, in a slightly dazed state at this healthy baby girl in their care. “It’s a very moving thing for staff, very moving,” said Patti LaMonica, director of St. Francis’ emergency department, who was involved in this case and two others at another hospital. “The staff almost feel that they have delivered this baby . . . It’s sad for the mom, but happy, in a way, the mom had some outlet.” (Megan 2009)

This story about the Baby Hannah Lynn case emphasizes that despite a secretive pregnancy and home birth to a fatherless child, the woman knew to cut and tie the umbilical cord and had the strength to travel to the hospital. The emergency room staff is portrayed as sympathetic to this nervous and determined mother, and the story demonstrates that the no-questions-asked motto of safe haven laws is not strictly true. Questions are asked, but legally do not need to be answered. Providing evidence that safe havens are focused on the infant and not on the woman who just gave birth, the story dramatically states, “quickly, as usually happens in Safe Haven cases, the mother vanished.” As noted earlier, the safe haven law’s inattention to women’s postpartum health is remarkable, particularly given the strength of the medical profession’s and many legislators’ opposition to home birth as unsafe even when attended by trained midwives (Block 2008; Craven 2010). The emotional investment of hospital staff in the Illinois safe haven baby case is mirrored in media coverage of other cases. In the Connecticut Christmas miracle case, nurses first felt “dazed,” but later “very moved” to the point to which they “almost feel they have delivered this baby.” This presumably means not that they felt that they personally gave birth, but that they assisted the newborn’s welcome to the world. This assertion and attachment erases the fact that, as far as we know, the mother gave birth at home alone and did not need medical assistance. The director of the ER’s assessment of how safe havens feel for emergency responders is a balanced one, noting that a safe haven surrender is “sad for the mom, but happy, in a way, the mom had some outlet.” This statement withholds a moral judgment of women or girls who relinquish newborns at safe haven sites, and also retains the assumption that the mother is pained to part with her infant—which both oversimplifies the feelings safe haven mothers may have and imbues the infant with mater-

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nal love, making it socially acceptable for her to relinquish motherhood. Care for the safe haven mother’s health and emotional well-being is not part of the picture. The lingering question of why and with what sense of emotion women or girls surrender their newborns remains. Given the diversity of women and girls who decide to relinquish infants at safe havens, the reasons and feelings are presumably also diverse. However, in the media, the repetition of statements about relinquishment being a loving act emphasizes that love is the socially desired feeling a mother should have for her baby. For example, St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut gathered government representatives and administrators to celebrate safe haven laws and the eight babies surrendered between October 2000 and late April 2008. At the celebration, Governor M. Jodi Rell “acknowledged that many people may find it hard to understand why a mother would give up a newborn baby, but said, ‘No matter the circumstances, whoever brought that baby really loved that baby,’” referring to a surrender just one week before the celebration (Alix 2008). Newborn surrender is portrayed as having high social value because it is an act of love. Emphasizing similar themes, a 2002 California relinquishment of a newborn still wet with amniotic fluid and with the umbilical cord attached led to praise and an advertising message by the chief nurse executive of a San Bernardino Catholic hospital: “This woman did a brave thing . . . We are just thrilled she chose St. Bernardine instead of leaving it out in the heat to die” (Wells 2002). In Arizona after a woman surrendered a baby girl at a hospital in 2002, a nurse explained, “we are very excited that she knew about the program and proud that she had the courage to save her baby’s life . . . We didn’t ask her any questions . . . and nobody here was looking to make judgments” (quoted in Skinner 2002). What is not addressed is that other choices could have been possible for each pregnant woman, including social support, prenatal care, assisted birth, and service that could allow her to raise her own child. In the safe haven framework—which fits with current biomedical and legal frameworks—the quality of the woman’s experience is not what is important, and the delivery of a healthy product is the focus (see Rothman 1991, 1993, 2005; Murphy-Lawless 1999; Martin 2001; Edwards 2005; Block 2008; Wagner 2008). The nurse’s statement, one not uncommonly spoken by health professionals and firefighters who receive safe haven

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babies, is that “judgments are not made.” Her statement about being proud of the woman is, however, a judgment—a positive one—so what she really means is that negative judgments were not, or should not, be made about women who relinquish their newborns. This nonjudgment claim promotes the image that good mothers use safe haven sites. A Florida news story about two young women who drove to a fire station with a newborn in the back seat echoes this perspective, yet also emphasizes the emotional side of safe haven surrender. A paramedic who was checking equipment who spoke to them reported that “One woman meekly asked if this was where she could leave the newborn, who was wrapped in a delivery blanket and still had part of her umbilical cord attached” (quoted in Maguire 2008). The paramedic stated, “I told her the baby would be in the best care possible and it was a good decision she made . . . I even told her she could be proud of herself ” (quoted in Maguire 2008). One woman, presumably the newborn’s mother, was particularly distressed, and the firefighter understood the difficulty of this surrender: “It took an awful lot for the girls to come and give up something so precious . . . They were able to walk away without scrutiny, and that’s what makes this program so beautiful” (quoted in Maguire 2008). Commenting on the case, the founder of Florida’s A Safe Haven for Newborns, Nick Silverio, emphasizes that the mother “did the right thing, the right way . . . The importance is to praise [the mother] for being very brave and courageous doing what she did. We encourage people if they can’t keep their child, this is the best alternative” (quoted in Maguire 2008). These positive messages seem to be directed toward an individual, anonymous woman, yet they also reach all readers in order to build or sustain the idea that safe havens are best for newborns and the right thing for women and girls, even though relinquishment may be emotionally hard for the birth mothers. But not all media coverage or judgments of safe haven use are positive. An emergency room staff member in Alabama reported her own distaste about one teen’s use of the safe haven surrender law. The story reports that in 2000, at a time when the state’s safe haven law was being debated and a local safe haven law was in place, a “young girl” first called the hospital to double-check that her knowledge of the law was in line with what would happen (Hampson 2000). This action by the girl seems to follow safe haven advocacy education messages seeking to publicize

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the law, constituting model use of a safe haven. However, the news story continues, A few hours later, a teenager in jeans carrying a boy wrapped in a white blanket came into the ER. No diaper bag, no purse. She walked to the counter where [ER worker] Little was sitting and nonchalantly handed over the boy “like he was a bag of groceries,” Little thought. . . . “It’s sad, but this is how the program is supposed to work . . . I don’t want to read about any more babies thrown in the trash.” (Hampson 2000)

This reveals that even when a woman or girl follows the letter of the law in a model safe haven surrender act, she may face negative judgment by hospital staff. Even the model use of the baby safe haven was seen as sad because the method with which the teen handed the baby over was lacking expected maternal emotion. A Pennsylvania journalist’s celebratory safe haven story speaks back to this negative representation of relinquishment, recognizing that not everyone will agree with safe haven surrenders: It was, indeed, good news—the best possible news, in fact—when a woman in her late 20s or early 30s walked into the Memorial Hospital emergency room at 8:40 a.m. Sunday [four hours after giving birth] and handed her newborn baby girl over to a staff person because, she said, she couldn’t care for it. I know there will be plenty of people who will take this opportunity to speak badly of this woman who, they suppose, must have dropped off her baby like a sack of potatoes, without an ounce of love in her heart. But I would take exception to that notion. I don’t know a thing about this young mother other than what I’ve read in the newspapers, but I’ll guarantee you one thing: She loved that baby dearly and did what she thought was best for the child . . . And it’s alive and well because the mother took steps to make it so. (Hicks 2004)

Through competing narratives about the emotion with which a woman or girl surrenders her newborn, we see the stigma that a safe haven mom potentially faces: even if she uses a safe haven in a model way, she may be judged negatively. In one view, women and girls who appear to treat a

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baby as a sack of potatoes or groceries devalue the safe haven baby and, in turn, call into question the universality of maternal love. By pointing out that we cannot assume which feelings safe haven moms have about their newborns, we can expose that safe haven campaigns support limited ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.

What Counts as Good Enough? Rulings on Safe Haven Near Misses A challenging component of safe haven legislation in many states has been creating public and service providers’ awareness of the law. The awareness theory that if everyone knows the law, they can and will use it in a model way underwrites the safe haven versus dumpster dichotomy, which is an evocative shorthand for a right versus wrong argument. The reality, however, is more complex, and cases are publicized in which safe haven laws have been used almost correctly. What happens when someone tries to use a safe haven, but does not know the law well enough or trust it? Near-miss safe haven cases raise problems around enforcement of the law: should a woman or girl be judged based on her actions, or on the intent of her actions? The stated goal of baby safe haven laws is to save babies, so why does it matter whether or not a newborn’s dropoff conforms to the law exactly provided that the baby is safe? Across the country, law enforcement officials have ruled in different ways in near-miss cases, and media reports have been often sympathetic to the life-preserving actions of women and girls. For example, one writer praises a woman who left a newborn “swaddled in adult clothes” outside of a California fire station (see Foo 2006), and lays out the many socially understandable reasons why the woman may not have opted to raise the baby. Although no one reported seeing who dropped off the newborn, the stereotype of a low-income single teen who hid her pregnancy and gave birth alone is embedded in this thanks: Here is a message to the person who left a newborn baby outside Fire Station No. 8 in downtown San Jose last week: Thank you. You did the right thing. Maybe you are all alone and you don’t have a job or enough money to raise a child. Maybe you don’t have a place to live. Maybe you had

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the baby in secret, and you were terrified that someone—your parents?— would find out. One thing we do know, since the child was found swaddled warmly in adult clothes, is that you took good care of your baby in those first hours of life before you made what must have been a gutwrenching decision . . . Maybe you got scared because you see the signs all around you of how difficult it is to be a low income single parent, especially in a place as expensive as Silicon Valley . . . But even if it was only for a few hours, your baby was lucky to have you. (Hutchison 2006)

The writer juxtaposes this near-miss safe haven use with cases of mothers who “apparently didn’t know about the safe haven law, and their babies paid the price” through death or being left in unsafe places, and the author explicitly theorizes that the surrender was experienced as a “gut-wrenching decision.” Whereas other accounts also imbue the safe surrender action with love, this account highlights a more complicated logic that argues “if there is love, there will be pain upon separation.” This recognition is symbolically important in several ways, spelled out and contained in underlying assumptions about maternal love: first, it enhances the value of the baby and the narrative of its start in life; second, it brings visibility to the woman or girl and assumptions about her emotional experience; and third, safe haven surrenders are more socially palatable when they are difficult, because mothers should want to raise their own children. This logic has not been sustained, however, and there is evidence that the attempt to use a safe haven, a near miss, is judged, both socially and legally, in varied ways. One near-miss site that comes up quite often in news stories about abandoned babies is somewhere in or right near a hospital. The safe haven law in all states requires that an infant must be handed to a person at a designated place. Cases of newborns left in hospital bathrooms or outside hospital doors may indicate that a woman or girl did not want to face someone, but also sensed that a hospital was the right place to leave an infant. In Roseville, California, a rural area near Sacramento, a 27-year-old woman who left her newborn outside of a hospital hours after delivering her pled guilty to a felony and was sentenced to community service and probation for five years (Morita 2001). In the court case, it was revealed that Stephanie Anne Winship hid her pregnancy from her husband and stepson “because they could not af-

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ford a child and she thought he [her husband] would be angry with her” (Morita 2001). She also stated she suffered from depression, was working to support her family, and previously had six abortions. The 2001 case brought to light that in 1999, before the California safe haven law was passed, Winship had abandoned an infant on someone’s doorstep, which could be seen as responsible or irresponsible. Reflecting on both abandonment cases, Winship stated that “she tried to place the babies where she thought they would be found quickly and receive the necessary attention and care” (Morita 2001). The news story concludes on a note of sympathy for the mother, reporting that “Winship told her probation officer that she abandoned the infants so they would ‘have a chance for a good life with someone’” (Morita 2001). Coverage of this case provides insights into this woman’s decision-making. The circumstances of her life, including a caretaking role for her stepson and husband, mental health issues, economic pressures, and repeated terminated pregnancies, make a case for understanding why she would think it best to relinquish motherhood for the two newborns she abandoned. The complications of her life and past record of abandonment strengthened the legal case against her, leading to a felony charge and probation. In contrast, a circumstance in which someone left a “6-pound, 9.5-ounce black girl” less than one day old under a sink in a hospital bathroom in Maryland did not result in criminal charges (Blackburn and Linley 2002). An evening security guard found the newborn, later named Rosie by hospital staff, in a restroom near the entrance in a location where social workers assist patients. The mother explained in a note addressed to hospital staff that she was “homeless and said she was unable to care for her daughter” (Blackburn and Linley 2002). The Maryland legislature had passed a safe haven law in May, the same month this case happened, but the law did not take effect until October. Even so, to publicize the safe haven law in a positive way, officials decided not to prosecute the mother should she ever be found. An assistant state attorney and chief of the child abuse division overstates the safe haven connection, contending, “we’re exercising our discretion not to prosecute her because she is doing exactly what we are asking people in this situation to do” (quoted in Blackburn and Linley 2002). The director of the neonatal intensive care unit where Rosie was treated conceded less enthusiastically, “this mother lacked judgment, but at least she left her in

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a public place where she could be readily found” (quoted in Blackburn and Linley 2002). Although this was a near-miss safe haven case that predated the law, officials lauded it using a strategy to create awareness about the safe haven law and shape public opinion. Fire stations also figure prominently in near-miss safe haven cases. One news story notes that in El Paso, Texas, in September 2009, 10 years after that state’s law was passed, a two-day-old “fair-skinned blond girl,” wearing a T-shirt and with her umbilical cord tied with a shoelace, was wrapped in a towel and placed in a chair one foot outside of a fire station doorway (Borunda 2009; Sanchez 2009). Someone rang the doorbell and disappeared. Although the law states that a safe haven baby must be handed to an on-duty firefighter, a criminal investigation was not conducted and the El Paso Times claimed, “whoever left the little girl had the law on her side,” explaining that the Baby Moses Law is “for unprepared or unwilling parents to choose life for the baby” (Sanchez 2009). In Florida, the surrender of a healthy newborn with the umbilical cord and some placenta tissue still attached outside of a Coral Springs fire station was ruled to be within the “spirit of the law” (Dinkova 2011). News reports also covered a 2004 case in Massachusetts that coincided with legislative debates over a proposed a safe haven law. An infant, identified as Caucasian, was left wrapped in a purple towel on the steps of a fire station (Contrada 2004). This suggests that the person who dropped off the baby anticipated that fire stations would serve as safe havens in the future, or knew that they did so in other states. Churches represent a different symbol of care and sanctuary than fire stations, and perhaps churches are seen as safe havens in general, prompting infant relinquishment in and near them. In fact, laws in a handful of states specifically list churches as safe haven sites. In others states, churches have been deemed safe enough to be legal abandonment locations. For example, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, police said in a 2004 case that they would not investigate a woman who left a baby girl with a parishioner in a Catholic Church’s chapel, despite the fact that churches are not a specified baby safe haven sites (Marshall 2004). A 2008 case in the Seattle-Tacoma, Washington area reveals that women’s knowing about safe haven laws may not result in following the law properly. A 22-year-old woman labored alone outside for three hours around midnight while locked out of her apartment building, gave birth to a girl,

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and left her wrapped in a beach towel on the steps outside of a Presbyterian church (Clark 2008). The woman told the police that she knew about safe haven laws from a sign in a restaurant bathroom and disclosed that she had read on the Internet both about the law and about how to give birth alone. The journalist reported, “she said she ‘could have sworn’ she read churches were also considered safe havens” (Clark 2008); indeed, Arizona and New Hampshire specify churches and South Carolina and Vermont specify worship centers as safe haven sites. The newborn survived, and was placed in the care of her father’s mother; the baby’s father soon was to be deployed for 10 months in Iraq with the National Guard. He stated that he had been misled by his ex-girlfriend to believe she had had an abortion, which he reported they had decided together was best.3 The woman’s experiences were shared in a police report in which she explains, “I kept kind of thinking I was going to do the abortion thing and went along, went along, and I never actually acted on it, and then it came too late,” terming herself “an avoider . . . I am nowhere near responsible enough . . . I cannot take care of a baby, and I can’t deal with it . . . I knew that if I were to leave it at the church, it would be taken care of, you know, put into an adoption agency and getting her a family that really wanted it and give it a great life. Way better than I could ever do, ever” (Clark 2008). The case went to court, where news photos showed the woman to be white with blonde hair and an all-American girl look. The King County prosecutor used it as a “teachable moment,” stating, “I can appreciate that the decision to abandon the newborn was the product of confusion, fear and panic . . . This misdemeanor charge will ensure that the defendant recognizes the recklessness of her actions and is also able to get the supervision, treatment and support she needs in her life” (Sullivan 2009). The charge carried no jail time, 200 hours of community service, the requirement to work or be a student, obtain mental health counseling, and have contact with her child only with permission of Child Protective Services (Sullivan 2009). This case raises issues around father’s rights, access to abortion, and planned adoption. The young woman, professing not to have mothering instincts, cared enough about her baby to leave her in what she thought was a safe place and with mistaken knowledge of the safe haven law. Given that women of color often

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receive stricter sentencing than white women, had she been a woman of color, jail time would have been more likely (see Roberts 1999, 2001; Flavin 2009). A case in Denver in which the mother was never identified resulted in greater sympathy from and even celebration by church members than from the police, pointing to a tension in whether the mother should be seen as a distressed person who did her best or as a criminal who did not follow the safe haven law. A mother left her four-hours-old newborn in a church bathroom sink, wrapped in a T-shirt, while parishioners “were commemorating the last hours of Jesus Christ’s life” (Mitchell 2011). The Dominican priest praised the woman’s actions: “Nobody has any idea who the mother could be. The mother did what she thought was best . . . I applaud her for that. We prayed for the well-being of the mother and her newborn” (quoted in Mitchell 2011). A man who led the church service noted, “we can’t judge anyone for doing something like this . . . The economy; it’s hard” (quoted in Mitchell 2011). Elaborating on that theme, a nun spoke to the press with tears in her eyes as she thought about the woman’s possible life: “She may not have food or shelter. She may have given birth on the street . . . So many don’t have money . . . She had enough compassion for the child to bring him where he would get help and didn’t leave him somewhere where he might not have been found” (quoted in Mitchell 2011). Colorado’s safe haven law, however, requires safe haven surrenders to take place at fire stations or hospitals, and the Denver police did not agree that a church sink drop-off was a sufficient effort: “A newborn needs a lot of attention, and he’s not getting it in a sink,” flatly stated Leslie Branch-Wise, the Denver police spokeswoman (Mitchell 2011). These church cases highlight debates about whether, when a healthy abandoned newborn is found, officials should celebrate the intent of the mother to save the baby or the extent to which she followed the state’s safe haven law. This is similar to babies left near fire stations and in areas of hospitals not designated as safe havens, but carries an additional level of symbolic religious and community significance. In the Denver case, church members applauded the idea that women in distress turn to them as a place within their community that they trust. Further, when the relinquishment happens at a Catholic Church or another denomination that opposes abortion, the emphasis may be on the baby’s life as twice saved: once from abortion, and once from death by abandonment.

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But legal authorities, not church or other authorities, determine which near misses are valid or not and what the legal consequences are for failing to follow a safe haven law. A 33-year-old woman gave birth in a bathtub at home, then bundled the newborn in towels and left him at a Big Bear City, California church, calling 911. Her sentence was 15 days in a San Bernardino County jail and two years legal probation plus 200 hours of community service with Garden of Angels, the safe haven advocacy organization that lobbied for California’s safe haven laws (Open Access Criminal Records 2010). This community service requirement places the woman in a position in which a person through her bad example teaches the right example to others, perhaps repeatedly reliving the distress of the events surrounding her pregnancy, childbirth, and legal case. One of the most creative legal penalties for a young couple who nearly used a safe haven correctly is found in South Carolina, where a 16-year-old woman and 21-year-old man, who had a two-year-old and an 11-month-old, left their newborn in a diaper box outside a fire station eight years after the state passed its safe haven law (Peters 2008). Despite being left outside in 30-degree weather, the newborn survived. Officials ruled that the couple had made an attempt to follow the safe haven law. The solicitor sentenced the couple to “visit a prison, complete reproductive health counseling and parenting classes, take random drug and alcohol tests and perform community service at the Whitney Fire Department,” and, unique to other legal sentences, visit three other “instructive” places (Peters 2008). His remarks focused on the teen mother: “I’m going to require her to visit a children’s cemetery, which if you have never been to one, is one of the saddest places you’ll ever go . . . I’m going to require her to go to a mortuary because I want her to see how this could have turned out. I’m going to require her to go to a maternity ward so she can see how this should have turned out” (Peters 2008). The rationale behind these requirements is the assumption that the mother of two, who apparently was aware that a fire station was a safe surrender site, needed to understand the reality of newborn death because the baby she abandoned lived. But this case also is presented as requiring punishment to reach toward a higher goal: “I have settled on a course which I am hopeful will balance compassion with consequences, discipline with education, and achieve what all of us want, which is public awareness” (Peters 2008). Given that the couple nearly complied with the safe haven

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law, it seems that the public awareness sought was about the range of negative consequences of not using the law (prison time, mourning a baby’s death) and the rightness of giving birth in a hospital. These cases all focus on the place of surrender not being exactly in line with safe haven laws. Another type of near miss is use of a safe haven for a child who is not in the legal age range. Safe haven law age cutoffs range from three days to one year. Due to this variation, it is conceivable that even if a woman knows about safe haven laws, she may not know the age limits in the state she is in. Officials may have the possibility of misunderstanding in mind when they rule on safe haven cases involving infants who are not in the proper age range, or they may have the higher goal of saving a baby at any age as a driving force. For example, in one case, Massachusetts police reported that a 37-year-old homeless, drug-addicted woman “arrived at the front desk of the Holyoke Police Department clutching her three-month-old baby and a bag filled with diapers, wipes and bottles of warm baby formula,” saying that she “could no longer take care of the boy,” turning down an offer of help from police, and leaving the building (“Mom Finds Safe Haven for Infant” 2005). Despite the widely shared public perception that a homeless and drug-using mother is not a proper mother (see Murphy and Rosenbaum 1998; Connolly 2000), this story introduces the woman as performing an act of maternal love, with evidence that she cared for the baby adequately: she was “clutching” the healthy baby boy and had a supply of diapers, wipes, and even bottles of warm baby formula. The story continues, “it’s not exactly what proponents of the recently enacted Baby Safe Haven law had in mind, but they say it’s close enough” (“Mom Finds Safe Haven for Infant” 2005). The Massachusetts baby safe haven law’s age limit is seven days old. Instead of charging the woman for relinquishing her three-month-old, however, “Holyoke police Capt. Alan G. Fletcher said the destitute mother, known to police for having a history of drug use, made a responsible choice. ‘I just think the lady does have some problems, and I think she did the right thing. We’re in a very gray area here. Where do you go? . . . It’s better than finding the baby on a bench’” (“Mom Finds Safe Haven for Infant” 2005). Although the woman did not make use of the safe haven law correctly, both the police and the Department of Social Services decided not to bring criminal charges against her: “‘This is a loving mother who is trying to do some-

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thing to help her child,’ argued DSS spokeswoman” (“Mom Finds Safe Haven for Infant” 2005). Thus, it was the spirit of the surrender—giving the baby to an official, and the homeless, drug-using mother’s assessment that despite her efforts, he would be better off raised by someone else—that makes this a case deserving official and public sympathy. Even when women do follow safe haven laws the process may not go as legally intended, creating other types of near misses. In Arizona one year after a safe haven law was passed, a news story focused on a hospital birth and relinquishment and whether it could count as a safe haven surrender and be accorded anonymity. Tucson Medical Center spokeswoman Julia Strange intoned, This mother actually did a great thing—she had her baby safely in the hospital, not out behind a Dumpster, and she made sure the baby was safely given to the right people . . . If she had taken the baby out on the streets and left it at an emergency room, there would have been no questions asked. But she made sure her baby was given the best chance, in the safest way, despite the risk of being identified. (Innes 2002)

The problem was in the legal details: whereas a safe haven surrender is anonymous, this woman gave birth at the hospital and was registered under her real name. When she relinquished her newborn, hospital officials shared her name with Arizona Child Protective Services. Similarly, in a New Mexico case, a monolingual Spanish-speaking Mexican woman delivered a baby at a hospital and surrendered it. The state’s child welfare department assumed responsibility for the baby, and, contradicting the anonymity portion of safe haven laws, requested information from the hospital about the birthparents’ ethnicity to determine if the baby was Native American, in which case the Indian Child Welfare Act stipulations would be followed (Contreras 2002; Roybal 2002). These events signal some ways in which safe haven law is entangled both with hospital policies and adoption law. Revealing that a near-miss case may be generated not by the actions of the relinquisher, but instead by a hospital’s mismanagement, in 2006 a young woman surrendered a three-hour-old newborn in Minnesota, and, in breech of the Safe Place for Newborns Act, hospital staff called the police with the woman’s name and cell phone number (Linsk 2006).

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Each misstep by emergency responders to follow the law correctly caused consternation for safe haven advocates, who feared that media coverage could create distrust about the consequences of using a safe haven site and inhibit women from seeking them. Their anxiety was not unfounded, as demonstrated by a news headline that emphasized the protocol breech by ridiculing the usual safe haven messages: “Mom Left Baby, With No Questions Unasked” (Linsk 2006). Another nearly legal safe haven case involved differing laws in neighboring states. It is also one of the few cases in which a man is the one who relinquishes an infant. A high-profile 2002 case involving the safe haven advocacy organization AMT Children of Hope highlighted a man’s attempts to safely relinquish what the press called his newborn son, and the failure of lawmakers to pass a Massachusetts safe haven law (it passed two years later). A news story reported the deliberate handing over of a premature newborn at a hospital: “At first, the staff on duty at 3 a.m. yesterday at Wesson Women and Infant’s Unit at Baystate Medical Center thought the tall young man was carrying in an armful of towels. Upon closer inspection, they saw a tiny, premature baby girl bundled inside the layers of cloth. With the words ‘my girlfriend just had a baby’ only seconds out of his mouth, the young man turned and said he was going to get his girlfriend. Instead, he ran to his car . . . and sped away” (Angelo 2002). Because Massachusetts did not have a safe haven law at the time, the police stepped in to conduct a criminal investigation: “Police have little to go on, except the man is black, in his late teens or early 20s, was wearing jeans and a dark windbreaker and is tall—around 6 feet 2 inches. He drove off in a midsize tan or gray car. Police spent the day calling local high schools and clinics to try to get a lead on who the mother might be” (Angelo 2002). The police were not only interested in the man who dropped off the baby, they stated an intent to go to great lengths to find the baby’s mother: “We want to find out who the mother is . . . If we have to, we’ll call every ob-gyn [obstetrician-gynecologist] in the city” (quoted in Angelo 2002). This statement assumes that the woman had prenatal care when the stereotype of a teenager who abandons her infant is of a girl who hid her pregnancy from everyone, including doctors. Further, this case differs significantly from what is represented by advocates as the stereotypical safe haven case because it was not the mother

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surrendering the newborn; in fact, only four states require the baby’s mother to be present.4 But the value of the case as a vehicle for supporting safe haven legislation in Massachusetts was high, and increased enormously when the charismatic Tim Jaccard, who leads the Children of Hope Foundation (based in New York), contacted the Massachusetts Union-News. Jaccard reported that “He received a call at 1:50 a.m. yesterday on his agency’s hotline from a ‘nervous and young’ male who said he wanted to give up his girlfriend’s baby. Jaccard, thinking the man was in Connecticut, told him it was OK for him to drop the baby off at the hospital” (Angelo 2002). Jaccard hosted baby safe haven hotlines that served Massachusetts and other states, which explains the mistaken assumption that the man was in a state where safe haven laws existed (LaFleur 2005). The avid safe haven advocate defended the actions of the man: “‘He said there was a hospital really close by . . . It was his intent to relinquish the baby into a safe haven program. If he didn’t do what he did, I feel we’d be hearing a story that the baby had been found in a dumpster’” (Jaccard, quoted in Angelo 2002). This message was also voiced by Massachusetts State Representative Thomas O’Brien (D-Kingston), a cosponsor of a baby safe haven bill, who pointed to the case, saying, “I think it shows exactly why we need the legislation here . . . The father was attempting to do the right thing. Why should a parent who tried to do the right thing be prosecuted for saving the life of an infant?” (Guide 2002). In these arguments, the man’s intent to follow the law and rescue a premature baby trump the lack of a proper baby safe haven law. The news story juxtaposes the safely surrendered newborn by the man identified as the father or “dad” of the baby (without proof of that relationship) with the death of a newborn in a recent local case, when a 21-year-old mother was charged with manslaughter. She reportedly gave birth in her apartment, then wrapped the newborn boy in a towel and placed it in her closet. Days later, she threw the bundle into the Massachusetts Ware River. This case created a forum to promote safe haven laws. Michael and Jean Morrisey, who went on to found Baby Safe Haven New England and championed Massachusetts’s law as well as Hawaii’s, were present in the Ware River case courtroom and spoke to the press as representatives of the Massachusetts chapter of the Australia-based Bonnie Babes Foundation.5 The 21-year-old woman in the Ware River case, who also had a two-year-old son, was sentenced to 18 months to three

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years in a women’s prison on guilty charges of “improper disposal of a body” (Wen 2004). The conclusion of the other case was much different: the man who dropped off the premature newborn at the emergency room and his girlfriend were never identified. A South Carolina safe haven case had the potential effect in the opposite direction, possibly scaring women away from safe haven sites. A 20-year-old woman surrendered a healthy baby girl at a medical center in 2006 (“Abandoned Babies” 2006). The baby’s medical evaluation resulted in a positive drug test and a police search for the baby’s mother. Police argued that the safe haven law, called Daniel’s Law in South Carolina, only provided legal immunity regarding abandonment, not drug use during pregnancy (see Daniels 1996; Murphy and Rosenbaum 1998; Roberts 1999; Roth 2003). An op-ed grappled with the negative consequences of this police stance, characterizing young women and girls who use drugs as both the best candidates for safe haven use and more likely to dump a newborn because they see the law as risky: [The legal argument is] unlikely to be followed by the young women and girls who are troubled enough to use Daniel’s Law. They will see only that a woman who tried to use the law was hunted down and arrested by police anyway . . . Young women using drugs are likely to be the primary group at which Daniel’s Law is aimed. They are more likely to have the legal, financial and personal problems that would drive them to abandon their babies. If they don’t have faith that they can use Daniel’s Law, they may turn again to the trash bin . . . It is likely that a prosecuted woman could benefit from arrest. If a drug user is forced into treatment, she is better off. But the effect on this law and the babies it is meant to protect could be terrible. (“Abandoned Babies” 2006)

This op-ed’s conclusion reveals a tension between caring for the pregnant woman, portrayed as benefiting from court-mandated drug treatment, and caring for newborns by promoting the use of safe haven laws. This dual perspective that attends to both the mother’s lived realities and to a newborn’s needs is a key element of reproductive justice frameworks. However, reproductive justice advocates criticize the South Carolina legal precedent of prosecuting pregnant women for “drug delivery” during pregnancy or labor (see Daniels 1996; Roberts 1999; Roth

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2003; Flavin 2009). The op-ed calls for officials to avoid intervening in the safe haven law by drug testing, and suggests that state-mandated drug treatment is appropriate for drug-using women. In this framework the role of the state is to protect the safe haven law (seen as good for newborns), but also to enforce mandatory drug treatment for pregnant women (seen as good for these women). From a reproductive justice view, state intervention in pregnant women’s drug use is not always good for women because it comes with criminal penalties of child abuse and the separation of women from their babies. Some safe haven proponents have aimed to reduce near misses or the misuse of safe havens by revising laws to expand the number and types of legal safe haven sites: hospitals, fire stations, police stations, ambulances, churches, birthing centers, crisis pregnancy centers, child welfare agencies, adoption agency, law enforcement agencies, health centers, medical facilities, and worship centers are listed in different states’ laws. In some regions, safe haven advocates are backing the idea of bringing the emergency responder to the infant instead of the infant brought to the responder. In West Phoenix, Arizona on the same day the governor declared Safe Baby Day in 2006, five years after the state passed the law, a premature newborn’s body was found in a trash can (Huicochea 2006). The perceived need for more publicity of the safe haven law motivated the Southwest Ambulance company “to make an announcement that all of its 200 ambulances statewide should be considered Safe Baby drop-off locations where mothers can hand over their babies within 72 hours of birth, just as at a hospital, fire station or any other safe-haven provider” (Huicochea 2006). Activists in some states work to offer ambulance/ EMT services as official safe haven sites, an idea implemented successfully first in New Jersey in 2010 by retired EMT and safe haven advocate Tim Jaccard (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010). In 22 states, emergency medical professionals are legal safe haven responders. A disturbing case that even mocks safe haven procedures and goals happened in 2009 when San Antonio firefighters found the lifeless body of a two-month-old Latina, wrapped in a pink blanket in a car seat, outside of the station (Associated Press 2009). Even more shocking, the infant had been physically abused. Although this relinquishment was near a safe haven site, it was as far off the mark as it could be. A note gave her name as Erica Laura Hernandez and pled for medical attention.

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An investigation led to the discovery that her actual name was Jada (also spelled Jayda) De La Rosa, and that her mother was 16 years old. Her mother confessed that the infant was dead at the time that the couple placed her outside the fire station located blocks from their apartment, and the infant’s 18-year-old father, Ramiro De La Rosa, was charged with injury to a child and serious bodily injury (Chasnoff 2009). The family lived together in impoverished conditions and admitted to heroin use (Kapitan 2009). News accounts stated that not only was the safe haven law broken because the infant had been abused, but also that she was over the age limit and not handed (alive and unharmed) to a fire fighter. Media stories sought to provide the information about how to use a safe haven correctly, stressing the value of saving an infant’s life in general and mourning Jada, who died due to maltreatment by her own parents. Publicity around this case pointed to the failure of Child Protective Services, family, neighbors, and friends to defend and nurture the infant (Chasnoff 2009; Clack 2009; Lucio, Moravec, and Mondo 2009). News coverage reinforced the message that safe havens play a positive role in putting at-risk babies into the safe hands of adoptive parents, and instructed people about proper use of safe haven sites. The De La Rosa far-miss case stands out because it symbolized disrespect for safe haven laws’ main goal of saving babies.

Warning! What Happens If There Are No Safe Havens (Or They Are Not Used) During states’ debates over safe haven laws and following their passage, media attention to illegally abandoned infants often juxtaposed the criminal abandonment with the option of safe haven surrender. Dead newborn cases instigated state safe haven laws and also assigned value to the infants’ short lives. In Gulfport, Mississippi in 2004, a news story reported that a woman left her newborn, wrapped in towels, at a church that was not designated as a safe haven, then later sought contact with the infant. The account reminds the reader, “the drop-off law became effective July 1, 2001, two years after a Mississippi State University student’s newborn was found dead in a trash can. The birth mother was arrested on a capital murder charge and later convicted on a reduced charge of manslaughter” (Fitzgerald 2004). This reporting reveals

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degrees of abandonment severity, with the dead baby in a trash can the worst case, followed by the better case of a newborn in a towel left in a church, followed by the best case, the use of the safe haven law. In Massachusetts, the site of years-long safe haven policy debate, a specific case involving a 22-year-old University of Massachusetts student is credited with spurring legislators to vote for a safe haven law (Contrada 2005). The young woman gave birth to a nine-pound, two-ounce boy in a residence hall bathroom, wrapped him in a towel and trash bag, and took the trash to a depository. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and her lawyer argued that she had a dissociative disorder that meant she could not recognize pregnancy or childbirth as having happened to her. Given her mental health status, it is necessary to ask whether even if a safe haven law was in place and she had known about it, she had the capacity to use it. Turning to safe haven promotion messages at the level of the national media, talk shows have presented forums for discussing the value of safe haven laws and emphasizing the penalties for girls and women who mistreat or kill their newborns. In particular, advocates point to talk show celebrity Oprah Winfrey’s support of safe haven laws as motivating the last states (Alaska, Nebraska, and Hawaii) to implement their laws (see Children of Hope’s media center tab and a full transcript posted on the Oprah Winfrey Show website). “All-American Tragedy” aired on November 3, 2006, and explicitly endorsed safe haven laws.6 Oprah addressed social-political debates about the laws: “Do safe haven laws protect babies or allow parents to desert them?” She turned this question to an older white-haired man seated in a guest area of the show, saying, “So, what do you think about this, Judge?” The Judge is Edward Zeleski, who sentenced a young woman, Jessica, to six years in prison after she pled guilty to “seven felonies including involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment and gross abuse of a corpse.” Zeleski explained that he advocates safe haven policies and announced that three remaining states were considering this legislation (Washington, DC, not a state, was not in the tally). Thus, Oprah shored up her support of the law with the view of a legal authority who has judged harshly a case of infant death. Oprah turned to a large video screen, where a young white woman with short blonde-brown hair is pictured via satellite, asking with concern, “Jessica, what’s life like for you in prison?” Jessica Coleman, re-

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plied plaintively that “It’s hard and it’s a life that I never thought I’d ever have to lead.” She explained that she lives in a maximum security prison, locked up for 17 hours each day with one cell mate. Her voice waivers and tears come to her eyes as she admits, “Sometimes I look around me, and it doesn’t even seem real, because this is what I’m gonna live for the next five years.” Her voice gains strength and volume and tears do not fall as Coleman argues, And I understand it’s a punishment and I understand that there’s people that will always think that, you know, whatever time I’m serving is not enough. But [her voice falters a bit again] I will be paying back for the rest of my life, every single day. I’d eventually love to be a mother and I can only imagine the kind of emotions that’s gonna bring me to. I just feel that I don’t always want to be associated with what had happened. I want a chance to make a difference. I want a chance to speak out and reach young girls and I feel that when I am released, I would love to get involved in programs and any type of opportunity to talk to people. (“AllAmerican Tragedy” 2006)

Colman’s expressed desire to be a mother in the future suggests that she does not have fundamental antimaternal feelings. Further, her desire is to teach parents how to be good parents, telling them to pay attention to what’s really going on in their daughters’ lives. With this emphasis, Coleman implies that closer parental oversight would have saved her from criminal actions. Coleman’s lived experiences reveal that she studiously avoided parental or other adult intervention into her pregnancy, which calls into question the efficacy of parental oversight. As a 15-year-old high school student in the small town of Columbia Station, Ohio, she gave birth alone, sitting on a toilet at home while her parents were in the house. She put the baby’s body in a duffle bag and accused her boyfriend of dropping the bag in a local quarry in 1999. Six years later, this former cheerleader, star athlete, and honor student turned herself in for the crime. A cautionary tale is part of this Oprah segment: Coleman did not have the option of a safe haven surrender because there was no such law in Ohio in 1999; in that year Texas passed the first safe haven law. During Coleman’s pregnancy, the father of the baby and her boyfriend,

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a high school senior and popular basketball star, agreed to keep the pregnancy a secret. Oprah states, “Jessica also says when Tom would come home from college, he would ‘sometimes stand on my stomach so it wouldn’t protrude forward.’ Tom denies ever doing this.” Coleman battled with anorexia and bulimia, and went to great lengths to keep the pregnancy from everyone in her life, revolving around controlling her weight: “It became my number one goal not to let anyone realize that I was pregnant.” Jessica Coleman’s pregnancy story is interesting to compare to the infant abandonment and adoption organization Project Cuddle’s video that features Gloria, who at age 16 was a straight-A student with lots of friends (“Project Cuddle Official Video” 2007). She became pregnant and was afraid to tell her parents. Her face is not shown, but her back is, and she speaks with Spanish-inflected English, wearing her long, dark hair in a ponytail, identifying her as Latina. She states that she came from a Catholic home where it was “forbidden, to ever talk about pregnancies or to ever talk about sex or anything like that.” She delivered her baby alone at home in the bathroom and the baby died. Gloria recalls, as prison scenes are shown in the background, “The day that I was found guilty of all the charges of murdering my daughter, I, I didn’t know how to react to this because [her voice becomes weak and gravelly with emotion] I, in my mind, I didn’t know what was going on with me.” Gloria presents herself as a victim of her immigrant, Catholic family’s silence around contraception and ignorance of pregnancy and birth.7 These reasons for her newborn’s death in her home bathroom, no matter how real to her, did not hold up in court. Gloria’s case presents a stark warning about an all-American girl who was victimized by a stereotypical Latino home in which sex and pregnancy are not discussed. On the Oprah Winfrey Show, Coleman discussed in detail the events around the secret of her newborn’s birth and death in a white middleclass home. During school, Coleman experienced intense cramps and was taken home by her mother, a nurse, who then returned to work. There is an unstated irony here, that her mother, a health professional, was caring for others when she could have cared for her own daughter. Coleman later gave birth at home in her bathroom, where her baby “fell out in the toilet.” She staggered to her bedroom with the newborn

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boy who made no noise, and as she tried to clean him off, unsure of whether or not he was stillborn, she passed out due to a loss of blood. Her body was on top of the newborn. Coleman claims that she had tried to clear his mouth and clamped the umbilical cord with a barrette, both actions showing she had some knowledge of postnatal birth practices. After she regained consciousness, her parents, who had no idea she had just given birth, called her down to dinner, and she joined the family. After the meal, she discovered that the baby did not show any signs of movement, and then, “I stabbed him in the chest because I thought I was taking away his pain,” Jessica admitted, showing a lack of clear thinking. “I didn’t do it to hurt him intentionally.” She put the body in a duffle bag, placed it in her bedroom closet, and went to school the next day. Coleman reported that her boyfriend took the duffle bag that evening, and without telling her, threw it in a local quarry. The case gained visibility six months later, when a diver turned in to the sheriff ’s department a bag with rocks and the newborn’s body in it. But there was no trace of who had abandoned the baby this way. He was named Baby Boy Hope, and some community members— perhaps linked to Children of Hope established in New Jersey in 1998—performed a burial service. The secret identities of the newborn’s mother and father remained. Years later, however, Coleman’s feelings of guilt and admission of her past led to her apprehension by the sheriff ’s department. Six years after the newborn’s death, she was at a bar with a boyfriend discussing their future and the possibility of marriage. She “had a nervous breakdown” and while crying, told him what had happened with the baby. Friends of the couple overheard the conversation, and called in an anonymous tip, leading Lorraine County Sheriff ’s department detective Karl Yost to interview Coleman (Avila 2006). Yost admitted, “I was expecting a person I could have an excuse not to like . . . Maybe a drug user, someone living in the streets, but it turned out to be an all-American girl—blonde hair, blue eyes” (“All-American Tragedy” 2006). On ABC’s 20/20 he is more emphatic, and generalizes to “society”: “I think we all wanted to think there was some kind of monster behind this, because who else would do this besides a monster?” (Avila 2006). In other words, Detective Yost assumes everyone agrees that a young, blonde haired, blue-eyed woman would be a good mother, unlike a drug user, woman of color, or homeless

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woman who is automatically a monster mother (unless she safely relinquishes her baby, as in the Holyoke, Massachusetts case discussed above). The offense, at least symbolically, is even worse for the all-American girl because she acted in a way not seen as scripted for her social type.8 After several police interviews Coleman confessed, and then the infant’s father, Tom Truelson, did as well. The sentencing for the pair was drastically imbalanced, revealing the much heavier legal weight of her antimaternal than his antipaternal actions. She was tried as an adult and sentenced to six years in prison, pleading guilty to child endangerment and involuntary manslaughter; he was sentenced to two years after pleading guilty to obstruction and gross abuse of a corpse, then granted early release after the first year (Avila 2006; Dubail 2007). Judge Zaleski’s ruling was attended by the media and the judge’s own family: “He asked his family, including his then 14-year-old granddaughter, to sit in his courtroom when he handed down his sentence. ‘I felt it very important to have my children and granddaughter there to teach them some of life’s important decisions on what could happen in a tragedy. And let them learn and perhaps pass it on to other children.’” The judgment was a teachable moment about the wrongs of a hidden pregnancy, hidden childbirth, and hidden newborn death. Picking up where this story leaves off, Oprah’s show segued to promote safe haven laws as another way that tragedies can be avoided, featuring an Idaho reporter who covered a story about a dead abandoned baby, worked to pass an Idaho safe haven law, and even adopted a safe haven baby. Speaking on Oprah’s show from prison, Jessica Coleman stated that she supports safe haven laws and thinks that concealment of pregnancy is the main problem: “‘When I look back, more than anything I wish I would have just turned to somebody as soon as I found out. If I would have known of things like [safe haven laws], I could have had a plan . . . I could have figured out something and possibly taken him somewhere where he could have been safe. I feel that if I would have been more knowledgeable of options, the outcome never would have been what it is today.’” This is a bit of wishful thinking given that Texas was the only state in 1999 that had a safe haven law and Ohio, where she lived, only passed legislation in 2001. Oprah’s show ends on a surprising and sad note, providing a different meaning to the show’s title, “All-American Tragedy.” Indeed,

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although Oprah and Coleman do not share a generation, racial identity, family class status, or sense of growing up in the same region of the United States (Mississippi vs. Ohio), Oprah faces the screen where Coleman is pictured, and poses an important question to her entire audience, “Did you know that at the age of 14, I hid a pregnancy? I was raped at 9 and sexually abused from the time I was 10 to 14. At 14 years old, I became pregnant.” Oprah addresses the screen showing Jessica, and continues, I hid that pregnancy from everybody. One day my ankles started to swell. I was taken to the hospital and the doctors said, “Are you pregnant?” I didn’t even know what pregnancy was. I’d been abused all this time, but I really wasn’t even sure that the outcome was you have a baby. So I confessed that I had been having sex with people who had been abusing me for years. The stress of that confession caused me to go into labor, and the baby died. (“All-American Tragedy” 2006)9

What is shared between Oprah and Coleman is unwanted teenage pregnancy as well as the death of a newborn. Both the circumstances and outcomes of their respective pregnancies are substantially different (lack of sexual consent vs. consent; Oprah’s doctor discovers pregnancy vs. Coleman’s mother, a nurse, does not discover pregnancy; birth is not secret vs. birth is secret). Oprah, however, emphasizes connections and redemption, sharing with Coleman words that she has been uplifted by: “And my father said to me at that time what I’m going to say to you,” Oprah continues, looking at Jessica. “‘What you have done is the past, and you alone get to determine what your future will be.’” Oprah positions herself alongside Coleman, asserting that they both can improve the lives of others, specifically teens, by emphasizing the importance of speaking up for help and not being defined by the difficulties in your life. Although Coleman’s pregnancy was the result of a consensual relationship, Oprah draws on her own hidden sexual abuse that resulted in pregnancy when offering Coleman and her audience these words of encouragement: You have five more years to serve in prison. There are a lot of teenagers out there right now who are hiding their secret, just as I had mine,

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because I didn’t think there was anybody I could tell about the abuse. I didn’t think there was anybody I could share it with, just like you didn’t feel that there was anybody you could tell. Your speaking out today is going to give a lot of girls the courage to do that. You are not your past. You are what is possible for you. Own this truth and move forward in your life. Forgive yourself, and others will be able to forgive you. (“AllAmerican Tragedy” 2006)

In line with safe haven public service announcements, Oprah’s appeal suggests that there are many teenagers hiding their secret—which, in the context of this talk show episode, applies to sexual abuse, unwanted teenage pregnancy, and infant murder—and that the solution to this problem is their reaching out to someone. Oprah’s gift of support for secret-holders to speak out could be interpreted to mean that stories of undisclosed, abandoned infants born to isolated teenagers will be told. However, Oprah seems to focus on the part of Coleman’s life narrative that a broader range of viewers might relate to: fear about admitting that she was pregnant. Finally, her comments on forgiveness demonstrate that redemption is possible, even for a teenager who may have killed—and certainly hid, maimed, and disposed of—her newborn. The viewer can conclude that if Oprah could have sympathy, even empathy for Jessica Coleman, she would understand their troubles and support them too. The theme of redemption is seen further in Coleman’s plan to educate young women about safe haven laws and communicating with their parents so that others do not suffer as she did. Activists and journalists credit Oprah’s show and her support for safe haven laws with motivating first Hawaii and then Nebraska to pass safe haven legislation, two of the three states singled out by Oprah’s show as lacking a law (Pilger and Winter 2007). In Lincoln, Nebraska, Deanna Weeks watched the Oprah Winfrey Show and was motivated, as “just a concerned citizen with two children,” to do something. She worked to establish a local ordinance because “I can’t stand by and do nothing . . . while babies are dying” (Pilger and Winter 2007). Seeing safe haven legislation stalled at the state level, Weeks set out to lobby individual cities to create safe haven ordinances. Nebraska cities, however, could not guarantee legal immunity for women who use safe havens, and women would still face the state’s judgment of “a misdemeanor with a maximum

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penalty of one year of confinement and a $1,000 fine” (Winter 2007). Safe haven advocates demanded state action. Media attention to the negative consequences of not having legal safe havens in every state and of girls and women not using safe havens highlights the risks both of a newborn’s death and a mother’s imprisonment. With this framing, safe haven laws are portrayed as the right thing to do for infants, for women, and for our society. Keeping this in mind, I turn now to analyze how pressure on Nebraska to follow other states to allow women and girls to do the right thing by relinquishing newborns did result in a safe haven law, but with unexpected social consequences.

Nebraska’s Special Safe Haven Cases Nebraska represents a special safe haven law case for two main reasons: it was the last state to pass a safe haven law—on February 13, 2008, only days after Alaska and Hawaii did so—and after political wrangling, legislators implemented a law with an uncommon feature.10 Conflicts among Nebraska state politicians had delayed the law’s passage for years, and national attention to the lack of a safe haven policy moved legislators to a compromise “after several years of arguing over the details of bills that would allow a desperate mother to legally leave her child in a safe place” (Hicks 2008a). Strong opposition to safe haven laws as ignoring deep social problems was voiced and filibusters enacted by Independent Senator Ernie Chambers, who agreed to a legislative compromise to end the ongoing debates. A news story described the unconventional agreement process: Senators couldn’t decide on an appropriate age: 72 hours, 30 days, one year? . . . It was clear the system had stalled. Debate simply stopped. A dozen senators clustered in the middle aisle . . . From that huddle came the agreement that Nebraska’s safe haven would be available for all children, not just infants . . . . Chambers, an inveterate opponent, had agreed to drop his filibuster if senators still fighting could come up with a compromise. (Hicks 2008b, emphasis added)

Some argued that the law’s age-limitless feature was positive because it was novel: “‘This is cutting-edge,’ said Sen. Rich Pahls of Omaha, one

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of two senators who . . . sponsored safe haven bills. ‘There is nothing comparable’” (quoted in Hicks 2008a). The years-long Nebraska debate featured Senator Chambers’ opposition to a safe haven law on the same basis that the reproductive justice framework offered in this book does: safe haven laws do not address the social conditions that may lead a woman or girl to question whether she can raise a newborn. “I don’t like society putting its stamp of approval on women abandoning their babies,” said Chambers. “What is it in a society that will make a young woman feel so desperate that she cannot hold on to what may be the most important thing in her life?” (quoted in Young 2008a). Just as reproductive justice advocates are concerned with the social disapproval of some women’s mothering on the grounds of class, race, or age, Chambers suggested that vulnerable women who are seen as unfit mothers may be pushed by the law’s social acceptance of safe abandonment to see themselves as unfit and to suffer emotionally from relinquishing a newborn. Chambers’s challenging words anticipated national media coverage that revealed some anguished parents’ and guardians’ economic and emotional struggles to raise children—issues that had not previously been highlighted in debates over safe haven laws. The Nebraska law went into effect on July 1, 2008, with the provision that children and teens 17 years old and under could be legally surrendered at safe haven sites. In mid-September, the first safe haven surrenders took place in two hospitals: one case was an 11-year-old boy and the other a 15-year-old boy (Young 2008b). Within days, a 13-year-old girl was relinquished (Pluhacek 2008a). Illustrating well Senator Pahl’s contention that “there is nothing comparable” to Nebraska’s law, in no other state was there the complex situation of a 16-year-old turning in herself and her 10-month-old baby—accompanied by her aunt—at a safe haven site (Ross 2008b). The teen and her son arrived at an Omaha hospital after being displaced from the teen’s mother’s home, and both were placed in foster care. News coverage exposed both severe difficulties some people had with parenting and the inadequacies in social support for teens and youth in and beyond Nebraska. By mid-October, three months after the safe haven law was enacted, none of the 33 surrendered children were young infants (Munger 2008). Children were relinquished at safe haven sites

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by their parents or guardians, and the majority were teenagers who had “histories of severe psychiatric or behavioral problems” (Bernstein and Searcey 2008). At least five parents or guardians crossed state lines to use the broad Nebraska law, travelling from Iowa, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, and Georgia. Government officials reacted by referring to this as abuse of Nebraska’s laws, despite the fact that cross-state and older child surrenders were legal. A child welfare advocate darkly joked on his blog, “At the rate things are going, it may become a verb: to ‘Nebraska’ one’s children, meaning, to become so utterly desperate that you drop off children of any age at a hospital, anywhere from Omaha to Scottsbluff, then turn around and leave” (Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, quoted in Hicks 2008c). Emphasizing the pain of being under the microscope, one journalist called Nebraska’s safe haven law a national embarrassment, noting that “national news agencies from NBC to the New York Times investigated. Damning editorials were written; Nebraskans winced when they opened their morning papers” (Ayoub 2009). Responses to this embarrassment went beyond jokes and wincing. Dawn Geras, an activist working for Illinois’s Save Abandoned Babies Foundation and the National Safe Haven Alliance, sought to differentiate Nebraska’s from “real” safe haven laws. She contended that Nebraska did not “have a true infant safe haven law but rather a Children in Need of Services law” (quoted in Young 2008g). This definition supported the argument that Nebraska needed to bring their law in line with other states in a way that would avoid tackling the severe lack of state support experienced by some parents and guardians. In this way, safe haven advocates signaled that safe haven laws are purely about saving babies, in effect emphasizing that caring for pregnant and parenting women and girls is outside the laws’ bounds. Events that unfolded in Nebraska demonstrated the need for a reproductive justice framework that emphasizes the importance of understanding safe haven laws as a strategy that works against addressing the social injustices that compel infant, and even child, abandonment. The Nebraska case reveals that safe haven laws should not be so easily framed as only about saving babies, because the state’s law brought to light unequal access to parenting resources. Indeed, proponents of legal revisions of Nebraska’s safe haven laws also appealed to fix the child

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welfare problems that the law exposed. For example, advocating for an age limit change in the law, the director of Health and Human Services’ division of children and family services stated, “I am very concerned that people are deciding they no longer want to be a parent and are taking advantage of LB157 [the safe haven law]” (Young 2008c). Officials instructed distressed parents, “if you feel like hitting or quitting, reach out for help from extended family, friends, churches and other resources” (Young 2008c). Overburdened agency leaders attempted to see the situation as an educational opportunity: “The safe-haven issue, I think, has shown us something that is not very pretty in our society and in our community, but it has also gotten the word out that there is help in the community” (Jim Blue, CEO of Lincoln’s Cedars children’s services, quoted in Young 2008c). However, as demonstrated by 33 children surrendered within three months, help from the community—family, friends, churches, and even the state—was insufficient for many people. Those who relinquished teenagers to safe havens were represented as performing an act of desperation rooted in love. Although the reasons women or girls surrender newborns at safe haven sites remains largely veiled due to the no-questions-asked feature of the law, reporters in Nebraska covered the decision-making process by some mothers and guardians of relinquished teens who spoke out. One heart-wrenching case involved a mother from the state of Georgia who packed a suitcase, medicine, and vaccination papers for her son with a plan to relinquish him safely at a Nebraska safe haven site. A reporter recounted: “He had asked her: Mom, do we have to go? ‘I know he loves me,’ she said . . . ‘He knows his mom loves and cares for him’” (Young 2008f). The woman’s brother lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, and she relinquished her son at a city hospital. The story reveals that the mother knew the letter of the law, and that she was acting within her rights: “Before she could get out of the parking lot, she said, a Lincoln police officer stopped her. The officer, she said, told her the safe haven law was intended for use by parents of infants. No sir, she told him, the law says ‘child.’ It was not intended for use by parents from outside the state, she heard him say. No sir, she said again, it’s for any child” (Young 2008f). Growing up in Georgia, the boy had been in juvenile detention, on probation, and in Big Brothers Big Sisters and the 100 Black Men of Atlanta programs, which suggests that the boy is in a high-risk social category and subjecting him

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to gendered racism (see Roberts 2001). The boy was denied residential program placements and his mother “went to work every day, stressed out, wondering which teacher or principal would call” (Young 2008f). This mother’s years-long dedication to her son ended with her having to defend her safe haven decision to a police officer after safely and legally surrendering him miles away from their home state. The Georgia mother’s story points to an inability of several programs to assist her son, while in other cases, the parent or guardian places blame on themselves. A 51-year-old grandmother who had legal custody of her 12-year-old grandson surrendered him at a Nebraska safe haven site and stated simply, “‘I feel like I’m a failure’” (quoted in Young 2008e). The boy needed extensive mental health treatment, and this Nebraska grandmother, like the mother from Georgia, tried many strategies before the last resort of a safe haven relinquishment. In contrast to the safe haven advocacy rhetoric about courageous, good mothers who relinquish newborns at safe havens, the media portrayed the parents and guardians of older children left at safe haven sites as abusing a law even though they were taking action that was legal. The national attention showered on Nebraska pointed to the mismatch with other states’ safe haven laws and the failure of social safety nets. One safe haven case provided even more insight into the pressures some families face and what can make a safe haven surrender a reasonable option for children of all ages.

Testing the Safe Haven Limits: The Staton Family Case These surprising safe haven stories, which starkly reveal that family caregivers cannot always find adequate resources to raise children, pale in comparison to the September 2008 Nebraska story that captured national attention. On one day, eleven children were surrendered at two Nebraska hospitals. At one site, two boys, ages 11 and 15, were surrendered; at the other, nine siblings from 17 years to 19 months old were turned over (Ross 2008a). Media attention to the nine siblings’ case included NBC’s Today Show, which hosted Amoria Micek, Gary Staton’s adopted daughter and the eldest stepsibling, who was too old for the safe haven law, sitting alongside her maternal grandfather and his wife (Young 2008d). The show included footage of the Staton’s dilapidated

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home and mixed black and white low-income neighborhood to illustrate the conditions of the children’s lives; the Staton family is white. On-thestreet interviews with neighbors emphasized that no one was aware of Staton’s severe hardships. When later interviewed by Lynn Safranek (2009a), a journalist with the Omaha World-Herald, Staton explained the challenging circumstances that drove him to make use of the safe haven law. Staton’s case, grounded in a lack of financial and social support, is represented as different from that of other so-called safe haven families because other cases were linked to “trouble getting help for adolescents with behavioral problems or mental illnesses” (Safranek 2009a). The language “safe haven families” refers to the families that surrendered the teens, as opposed to the families that fostered or adopted them. This language suggests a juxtaposition between families in need of safe havens and families who provide a safe haven through fostering and adoption. Staton’s problem is perceived as his being a low-income single father of nine children who could not provide a safe home. With compassion for the 36-year-old widower whose wife, RebelJane, died due to a cerebral aneurysm seven days following the birth of her tenth baby at age 34, the Omaha World-Herald story explains why Staton took this step: “Staton agrees he didn’t try to first get help from relatives or take advantage of public or private safety net programs. It appears the safe haven law was a way out for an overwhelmed single father” (Safranek 2009a). This suggests that safe haven relinquishment is understandable for overwhelmed parents, particularly those who do not want to rely on others. Indeed, this sounds very much like discourses about single teenage girls who conceal a pregnancy and give birth in secret, then have a crisis with nowhere to turn. Staton and his eldest daughter, Amoria, worked to care for the children for 18 months, Staton working as a machinist on a shift ending at 2 a.m. for $10.75 per hour and Amoria working at a fast food restaurant. The strain was severe enough for Stanton to consider suicide: “Three different times I had a knife in my hand, ready to end myself . . . But I couldn’t. I could (en)vision the kids crying at my funeral, and that would break my heart even more” (quoted in Safranek 2009a). One year after his wife’s death, he began a relationship with a woman he met on MySpace who moved in with the family. The arrangement lasted three months. Staton’s financial pressures continued,

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and he was afraid to seek state housing support upon threat of eviction. At this point, the Nebraska safe haven law was in the news. The news story covers the drama in detail: About that time, he heard news reports that people were dropping off kids at area hospitals, invoking the safe haven law and facing no criminal penalty. After some Internet research, Gary made his decision in late September. He huddled the children—everyone except Amoria—and told them he was taking them to the hospital to talk about their mother’s death. Gary looked stressed to Amoria, but she imagined he was worried about bills. Still, when she left to run errands, she had an unsettled feeling. She called a neighbor: If he comes back without the kids, call me right away. Gary gave the four older children bus money and drove the youngest five to Creighton [University Medical Center]. At the hospital, he told a woman at the front desk that he wanted to use the safe haven law for his kids. How many? she asked. Nine, he replied. Her eyes opened wide and her mouth dropped. Gary handed her an envelope with the kids’ birth certificates and Social Security cards, then went into a room to talk to police. When it came time for him to leave—he recalls it was about an hour later—he asked a hospital staffer to take the kids to a separate room so they didn’t have to see him leave. The staffer walked Gary outside, hugged him and asked if he was OK. He wasn’t—and yet he was. Gary left the hospital heartbroken, but feeling less burdened than he had in a long time. (Safranek 2009a)

In this account, the woman working at the hospital who received the children cared about Stanton to the point of embracing him. Staton relinquished his fatherhood, just as many women have relinquished their motherhood, by using a safe haven, but this account contrasts with the standard depiction of how relinquishing mothers are treated

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at safe haven sites. As we have seen in safe haven advocacy and education videos, which mainly feature a teenaged woman alone handing a newborn to a firefighter, at no point is a hug exchanged or words of care expressed. However, Amoria, the stepsister of the children, was not as nonjudgmental as the nurse, and frantically worked to reunite the children and move them to her aunt’s home, refusing to talk to her father for several weeks. The two eldest siblings remained in Omaha to finish school, and an aunt struggled to care for the youngest children (Hansen 2008). Staton stated that he rarely saw his children, the seven siblings placed with the maternal aunt and the two eldest boys later adopted by a couple in their seventies, but admitted that he retained paternal love: “I still love them to death . . . I’m just so worried about trying again and failing” (quoted in Safranek 2009a). Staton admitted that he did not want more children, and that he was at peace with his safe haven decision: “‘It was the best thing I could do for them’” (quoted in Safranek 2009a). Not all news coverage was empathetic. Opening the family to criticism, news stories publicized the family’s poverty and exactly how much state financial support the family received. One journalist notes, “the Statons had struggled even before the mother’s sudden death. According to court records, the family lived in an often filthy home and without gas and running water for months at a time. The living conditions prompted the state to remove the children from the home for most of 2004” (Hansen 2008). Just over one year after the children were relinquished, Stanton was in the news again. He e-mailed the Omaha News-Herald to confirm that his girlfriend was pregnant and posed a question filled with irony and challenge: “Do you think I’m going to raise this one alone?” (quoted in Safranek 2009b). A FoxNews interview with a family member stated that Staton showed his children an ultrasound picture of twins (Miller 2009). Lynn Safranek, the journalist who regularly covered this safe haven case, reacted by exposing these financial details: Since the Staton children were young, the family has received $995,468 in different forms of government aid, including more than $600,000 in food stamps and $109,774 in Medicaid, according to Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services records . . . The children were placed in fos-

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ter care after their father left them. Under the latest figures available, the state paid an average $725 a month per child to foster parents in similar situations. (Safranek 2009b)

This account establishes that Staton was an unsuccessful breadwinner. It also clarifies the expense of caring for a large family, and divulges that the family received nearly $1 million dollars, suggesting an overindulgent state catering to a financially irresponsible family. Staton’s deceased wife’s stepmother contended that in a reverse situation in which RebelJane had been a single mother, she would have reached out for family assistance and not allowed the children to be relinquished (Miller 2009). The Omaha journalist both highlights the family’s economic status and voices concern about how the other children will react to their father’s new baby, establishing that he does not care enough about their best emotional interests. Safranek points out the inconsistency between Stanton’s previous words and his impending fatherhood: “At the time, Staton said he did not want more children and would be willing to take steps to make sure he couldn’t father any more [children]. ‘If I had a thousand dollars,’ he said, ‘I’d get fixed’” (quoted in Safranek 2009b). In the United States, a vasectomy costs between $350 and $1,000 (Planned Parenthood 2013). The news story leaves it up to the reader to do the math, comparing the cost of male contraception with the cost of social welfare and foster care. Other critical calculations are also needed to determine what the statistic of nearly $1 million really means about government welfare assistance. The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (2009), a web-based advocacy organization, also noted the change in tone of these two news articles: “Two stories. Same subject. Same reporter. One is a finely nuanced portrait. The other is an act of vengeance.”11 The blog argues: Only much, much farther down in the story do we learn the ages of the children. Then a reader who was so inclined could pull out a calculator, do the math himself and find out that this huge total dollar figure probably comes down to about $169 per child per week. And little or none of it was for “welfare as we knew it.” It went to give the children health care

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and put more food on the table than Staton could afford on his machinist’s pay. A lot of the rest probably was Social Security survivor benefits, a fact mentioned in the first story, but not the second. (National Coalition for Child Protection Reform Blog 2009)

The blog takes issue with the journalist’s depiction of foster care and adoption financial supports, and reacts to Safranek’s opposition to Stanton’s announcement that he was expecting another baby. It mocks: “How dare he????? The nerve! The gall! Conceiving another child while still poor. And after he said he wouldn’t. Everybody knows only middleclass people should be allowed to procreate, right?” Something caused a shift for the reporter or her editor, perhaps a feeling of betrayal, that moved the representation of Staton from sympathetic to vindictive, the blog concludes. The blogger’s criticism sidesteps aspects of Staton’s fatherhood that gained him notoriety: the legal relinquishment of his nine children under a wide safe haven law and the willingness by him and other adult family members to speak to the media about it. What stands out is not just his poverty or change of mind about fathering another child; a safe haven case like this involving a family of any class background would be remarkable. Indeed, the notoriety of the Staton family case featured prominently in demands to create age limits for Nebraska’s safe haven law.

Unintended Consequences of the Nebraska Law The unconventional age limit in the original Nebraska safe haven law shifted attention from newborns in need to adolescents’ parents and caregivers in crisis. In November 2008, five months after the law was enacted, legislators passed an emergency bill to modify the safe haven policy, establishing the age limit of 30 days or less and bringing the law in line with that of other states. Overnight, the law was reoriented to meet the goal of saving infants. Some voiced opposition to this change, citing the interests of older children: Parents who had used the law and children’s rights groups begged the Legislature not to lower the age limit, saying the safe-haven statute was

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the only resource for desperate families. . . . “I just couldn’t in good conscience vote to support this bill, knowing it was going to close the door on getting services for older children,” [State Senator Annette] Dubas said. “This law may not have been the best way to handle it, but it provided options for them.” (Riccardi 2008)

Just nine hours before the age limit modification came into effect, a 14-year-old boy from California was relinquished at a Nebraska hospital: “Police believe the boy’s mother drove from Davis, a 1,160 mile trip along Interstate 80. She may have stopped at the town of 2,500 people because Kimball Health Services was the first hospital inside the state line . . . She literally dropped him off and left” (Pluhacek 2008b). The safe haven door for children over 30 days old closed after this case, but debate continued over the state’s support of children, parents, and guardians. However dramatic and difficult individuals’ cases, the outpouring of news stories and the number of children and teens dropped off at Nebraska safe havens created a forum for the analysis of the social resources needed for parents and their older children. As we have seen, such recognition of the lack of social support for pregnant girls and women is not addressed in general safe haven law discussions. Representations of the model use of safe havens depict a silent, compliant mother placing her newborn in the arms of a safe haven first responder, which forecloses an understanding of individual women’s decision-making and of the social contexts that may have guided her to relinquish motherhood. Further, missing from other states’ attention to safe haven laws is a focus on distressed parents and guardians of older children. Just one year after the original law was implemented, Nebraska legislators considered a package of bills addressing shortcomings exposed by the safe haven cases: “Together, the bills would create a state crisis hot line, help families navigate the system, expand mental health services for children, offer health coverage for more children in low-income families and address the shortage of behavioral health professionals in the state” (Spencer and Safranek 2008). There is also evidence that Nebraska hospitals continued years later to accept children dropped off by distressed parents, as was the case for three children aged two, three, and four: “A year or two years ago, this would have been a ‘safe haven’ case” [Police officer Katie] Flood said. Still, Flood said, the woman in this case did the

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right thing by going to a hospital for help, even though the ‘safe haven’ law didn’t apply” (Pilger 2011). Missing from this story is attention to the legal aspects of a hospital relinquishment: Nebraska’s safe haven law provided the same safety net care for newborns up to 30 days old, plus an immunity from criminal prosecution that is not accorded to those who relinquish older children. The actual legislative outcome in Nebraska was a services-for-children bill allocating $16 million, down from an early proposal of nearly $150 million, over two years to strengthen services (“Services-For-Children Bill Is Among Many to Get Final OK” 2009). The bill included establishing the Children’s Behavioral Health Oversight Committee and statewide hotline, and broadening eligibility for health insurance coverage, counseling, and case management support for foster and adoptive families (Ayoub 2009). Family advocates continued to lobby for more state funding, particularly for children’s mental health services and the foster care system (“Forum Puts Focus on Care” 2009). The scrutiny of levels of support for children and their families in Nebraska was valuable, and debates in Nebraska revealed that safe haven laws do not address the reasons motivating the relinquishment of motherhood, opening the door for a reproductive justice framing of the limits and effects of safe haven laws. No other state discussed the struggles of parents and guardians with the same urgency or depth as Nebraska did. The state’s unique way of implementing the safe haven law offers insight into how economic and social support for women, children, and families—key in reproductive justice advocacy—could be the central safe haven issue instead of the single-focus on saving babies.

The Complex Realities of Safe Haven Relinquishment As we have seen, media coverage of safe haven cases reveals diverse safe haven surrender experiences that are not depicted in safe haven campaigns. The model for safe haven use emphasizes that mothers make the right sacrifice by relinquishing their newborns anonymously and with love. Juxtaposed with this model, we see examples of women and girls who attempted to make use of a safe haven site but had a near-miss situation, resulting in varied legal consequences and moral judgments. The cases of women and girls who do not use safe havens and neglect or

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kill their newborns through abandonment are the most alarming cases and are the ones that safe haven laws are focused on eliminating. But it is the near misses that are the most analytically interesting. Police, court, media, and social judgments are made about the intent of the mother and whether she knew about safe haven laws and attempted to safely relinquish her infant. Some near-miss safe haven use is perceived as good enough because it both represents the spirit of the law and produces a saved baby. This supports the message that a good mother relinquishes her infant to ensure that her child has a better life than she thinks she can provide. The moral good of trying to save a newborn wins out over the illegal status of that act. Moving in an opposite direction, the special case of Nebraska’s safe haven law revealed legal cases that were subject to moral scrutiny. The law’s original form opened up social and political dialogue about why the parents or guardians of older children felt so pressed that they surrendered their children at safe havens during the time when Nebraska’s law was open to children 17 and under. Child welfare advocates and the relinquishers themselves pointed to inadequate social services driving their painful and relief-filled decisions. There has been no such open dialogue about the social roots of girls’ and women’s newborn safe haven relinquishment decisions. This reinforces the idea that pregnant mothers must make and cope with the consequences of their individual actions, which fails to recognize men’s roles in pregnancy or acknowledge that many mothers need increased levels of medical and social support. Based both in the anonymity guaranteed in safe haven laws and the stigma women and girls likely feel about safe haven drop-offs, silences leave a gap in our understandings of why some women and girls seek safe havens to relinquish their newborns. Baby safe haven laws operate to suppress open discussions about the conditions needed for mothers, children, and families to be adequately supported. Silence around the identity and views of safe haven moms means that safe haven babies and their adoptive families will not have knowledge of their genetic or family health backgrounds, and that the safe haven mom and her child will have little hope of ever reuniting. This runs against current open adoption practices that adoption advocates have fought for in order to break apart the association of adoption with secrecy that

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was institutionalized for decades in the United States. Safe haven legislation relies on silence around what leads some women to opt for relinquishment, effectively cutting off recognition of the social and economic reasons they do so. It is to this realm of heated debate that we turn in the next chapter, to analyze what the safe haven baby symbolizes in the adoption market, why some adoption advocates are so vehemently opposed to safe havens laws, and what the significance of the invisible safe haven mom is in discussions of safe haven laws as promoting fast-track adoptions.

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The Unsurpassed Adoption Value of Safe Haven Babies We introduced this legislation in response to the unfortunate, growing trend of desperate mothers abandoning their newborns in Dumpsters and other unfathomable places . . . The bottom line is that as a state of caring citizens, we need to protect these unwanted babies. —Wisconsin Rep. Jeff Plale (D-South Milwaukee), bill coauthored with Rep. Suzanne Jeskewitz (R-Menomonee Falls) (quoted in Chaptman 2001) It’s . . . a crisis. Let us have their little babies, and (the infants) have a chance at life. —Michigan Sen. Shirley Johnson (R-Royal Oak), Senate bill author (quoted in DeRamus 2000) Beverly and David Langella adopted a surrendered baby and can’t imagine the strength it must have taken for the parents to take advantage of the law. Beverly Langella said at a news conference Friday that it must have been a very hard, but also very loving, decision. “We are really blessed . . . We have the healthiest, sweetest boy in the world.” —Kotowski 2010

These heartfelt declarations point to the social and individual value of safe haven babies. In the first quote, a legislator argues that caring citizens must support the protection of unwanted babies. In the second, the emotional appeal to women to “let us have their little babies” suggests that the state saves babies from their mothers’ crises and simultaneously implies that there are crisis levels of abandoned babies. This sense of moral ownership of the responsibility of saving the lives of safe haven babies by placing them in deserving homes is reiterated by the National 165

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Safe Haven Alliance website in its “Meet Our Kids” section, which provides the stories of six safe haven babies (n.d.f, emphasis added). The superlative value of a safe haven baby is signaled in the third quote by an adoptive mother. Her adoration of her son as the “healthiest and sweetest” signals that safe haven babies should not be seen as damaged goods, and actually are even better than other babies. These perspectives point to how desirable safe haven babies are in the US adoption context. First, the unharmed baby requirement of safe haven surrender laws increases the value of the babies because they are deemed healthy (although there is no guarantee against future of disabilities, genetic health issues, or serious illness). Second, the idea of rescuing an innocent baby in need of a good family has a moral appeal, moving the child from being unwanted by a desperate woman to desperately desired by a couple. Third, the no-strings-attached adoption possibility due to the anonymity of the biological mother means that adopters do not need to negotiate an open adoption, potentially reducing the risk or the timeline of the risk that the birth mother or father would attempt to reclaim the baby. Given the rarity of healthy infants available for adoption in the United States, bluntly stated, safe haven laws produce a valuable domestic resource. A Seattle-based adoption supervisor puts it forthrightly, asserting, “there are certainly no shortage[s] of families willing to adopt a newborn” (Mary Ann Curran, quoted in Teichroeb 2000). Echoing this assumption, when Wisconsin politicians debated a safe haven law, a journalist emphasized not the desperation of a pregnant woman but the desires of those who wish to adopt, observing, “and who knows, as dozens of other states pass similar legislation, maybe it will become common knowledge that there is no reason to fear turning babies over to people who desperately want them. This is a country, after all, where people are so desperate to adopt that they place ads for babies in the classified sections of local newspapers” (Nichols 2001). Understandably, individuals seek to adopt a newborn based on a variety of reasons. But the vast majority of children available for adoption are not newborns, and thus there is a supply–demand mismatch. Safe haven laws have not been portrayed in legal debates or in the media as adoption laws, yet they are. Understanding domestic and international adoption markets, in which infants do not all have the same

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worth, illustrates why safe haven babies have such high social value. Social value includes interwoven emotional, symbolic, economic, and political components. To make sense of the overwhelming interest people express in adopting a safe haven baby, we must understand the broader adoption system and question how different safe haven adoptions are from other types of adoptions. Stories about adopting a safe haven baby carry messages about motherhood and families, and we can look to media representations of successful safe haven families and remarks by adoptive parents to demonstrate the unique attraction of safe haven babies.

The Politics of Adoptable Babies’ Unequal Values Infants who are relinquished at safe havens enter a state’s adoption system, and their value is determined by the system, which itself is shaped by the social politics and laws surrounding motherhood and fatherhood, families, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexual identity, ability, and other issues. A “central feature of the US adoption system” is a “division between private and public adoptions, and the color (and age) coded hierarchy of adoptable children, with associated differences in cost” (Wegar 2006, 11; see also Herman 2008). Adoptions are arranged by state agencies and their private contractors, which move children from foster care to adoption; by private organizations; and privately by individual facilitators, who work with lawyers to create agreements between pregnant women and adopters. Some infant abandonment prevention organizations facilitate adoptions in this way.1 Anthropologist Christine Ward Gailey notes that “Although researchers know this [facilitated] form of adoption is increasing, particularly for infant adoptions, exact figures are elusive because states are not required to collect data on this arrangement” (2010, 2). Statistics on types of domestic adoptions are not clear because data is not separated for private agency, kinship/stepparent, or Native American tribal adoptions (Gailey 2010, 1).2 Despite high visibility in the media and increased social acceptability, only an estimated 2 to 4 percent of US families have adopted a child (Gailey 2000, 11). The privileging of private over public adoption means that younger, healthier, and whiter infants are adopted privately by families with higher economic status, while families with fewer resources are more

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likely to adopt through public systems, which include higher numbers of older children, children of color, and children with special needs (Wegar 2006, 11). Since the 1990s, nearly half of all adoptions have involved children with special needs (Wegar 2006, 12). Feminist studies scholar Laura Briggs’s Somebody’s Children (2012) details the expansion of fostering and adoption systems in response to the so-called crack baby epidemic among low-income black and Latina women starting in 1989, demonstrating how politicized institutional pressures create variations in what types of children are eligible for fostering and adoption (see also Ortiz and Briggs 2003). Demographic shifts, the consumer-driven adoption market, and pervasive race–class inequalities support the perception that white babies are most highly valued and thus the most expensive adoption commodity. A US Census report documented that just over half (50.4%) of babies born were ethnic and racial minorities in 2011, which “highlight[s] a historic shift underway in the nation’s racial makeup” (Yen 2012).3 Adoption scholars point out that restrictive welfare laws and structural racism have led to a disproportionately high number of black children in foster care available for adoption (Gailey 2010, 7; Patton 2000; Ortiz and Briggs 2003; Rothman 2005; Herman 2008; Briggs 2012). Feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts makes this reality clear: “Black children make up nearly half of the foster care population, although they constitute less than one-fifth of the nation’s children” (Roberts 2001, vi). Barbara Katz Rothman, a feminist sociologist and adoptive white mother of a black daughter, argues further that in the United States, “we . . . have enough racism so that it is black babies and children that disproportionately are up for adoption, and white families that disproportionately have the wherewithal to adopt—and enough racism that it is hard to imagine the circumstances in which a black family would/could adopt a white baby” (2005, 10; see also Roberts 2001, 167; Quiroz 2007, 107–09). This hierarchy is connected to class and to expectations about parenting and lifestyles. Rothman reflects on pregnancy decision-making linked to race and class: “A lot of what adoption is about is poverty: a lack of access to contraception and abortion, a lack of access to the resources to raise children. And a lot of what poverty is about in America is racism” (Rothman 2005, 18; see also Roberts 2001; Solinger 2001; Quiroz 2007; Briggs 2012; Joyce 2013).

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Framed this way, an adoption decision—for both biological and adoptive parents—is not made in a context of individual free choice, but rather is facilitated and constrained by social structures and pressures, racism being the most visible. Perhaps the most cutting example of colliding race–class ideologies shaped by social perceptions is the mainstream moral elevation of white parents’ adoption of black babies and moral scrutiny of both black women’s mothering of black babies and white women bearing biracial black babies (Patton 2000; Twine 2000, 2011; Rothman 2005; Dubinsky 2010).4 The 1950s and 1960s mother-and-baby home system encouraged unmarried white middle-class women to move away from their hometowns to give birth and relinquish their babies for adoption. Despite the pressure placed on an estimated 1.5 million women for over two decades (Fessler 2006; Joyce 2013, 89), there was a perceived shortage of white babies, who were highly valued by white adopters and by agencies that were promoting a race-matching placement philosophy (May 1995, 143; Melosh 2002; Quiroz 2007). The emphasis on white families raising babies who look like their parents meant that “unwed White women who gave birth became the supply side of the adoption industry. Agencies became preoccupied with finding healthy ‘desirable’ infants for adoption at the expense of other children who may have been in desperate need of homes” (May 1995, 143; see also Herman 2008). From a different political position, race-matching was promoted by civil rights groups and most influentially articulated by the National Association of Black Social Workers, which released a position paper in 1972 arguing in the strongest terms that black children should be placed with black families to preserve racial identity and teach survival skills to black children growing up in a racist society (Patton, 2000, 3; see also Thompson 2000; Rothman 2005; Quiroz 2007; Dubinsky 2010; Smith, Jacobson, and Juárez 2011; Briggs 2012). This statement spoke back to the primacy of whiteness—symbolically connected with affluence—that privileged adoption by white families of white babies. Today, race, class background, and age continue to dictate unequal adoptive values, even though class is neither visible nor genetic, and categorization by race runs counter to color-blind adoption placement practices instituted in the late 1990s. Federal adoption reforms in 1996– 1997 mandated color-blind adoption placements as part of a larger pol-

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icy package (see Gailey 2010, 40). In response to criticism of excessively long foster care periods and barriers to adoption, a range of issues were addressed in these policies, including ensuring tax credits for adoptive parents, speeding the time to termination of birth parental rights, and reducing the “illegitimacy” of welfare recipients. But color-blind adoption policies do not mean that babies are viewed as unracialized and treated equally, and sociologist Heather Dalmage argues, “in fact, racial color blindness protects institutionalized racial inequalities. Overlooked by most who favor color-blind adoptions are the reasons why so many children of color are in the care of the child welfare system” (2006, 213; see also Roberts 2001; Quiroz 2007). To that point, Rothman states outright that “There is a well-known hierarchy in adoption, a ranking of adoptability . . . that reflects the socioeconomic structure: white babies of middle-class college-educated women are the most costly; babies of poor women of color the least, with the nuances of race and class played out in the middle” (2005, 69). Adam Pertman notes common adoption agency practices: “Nearly all practitioners charge most for adopting Caucasian babies, and it’s common for them to use some of the proceeds to subsidize people who adopt less-sought-after-children” (2000, 202; see also Quiroz 2007). Financial compensation to those who adopt “down” the adoption ladder may benefit those individual families, but nevertheless supports the racist, classist adoption classification system. Of course, adoptive families have varied resources, and thus have differential access to the most valued babies—and this is key to understanding the value of safe haven babies, the majority of which are placed in state foster-adopt care, which starts with a foster period with the intention of successful adoption procedures. Gailey writes, “there has long been a socioeconomic divide between those who adopt children from foster care and those who adopt privately or through private agencies. For decades, most foster parents have come from the working and lower-middle classes” (Gailey 2010, 18; see also Zelizer 1994, 206; Gailey 2000). Danielle Wozniak’s ethnography They’re All My Children supports this observation: the majority of foster mothers in Connecticut lived at or below the poverty level (2002, 211). Working- and lower-middle-class foster families may receive safe haven newborns through state systems within which very few healthy

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infants are available. Even so, these foster families must be assessed for their eligibility to adopt, and the definition of a proper adoptive home depends on race–class distinctions made by institutional decisionmakers. In state child welfare departments, social workers are powerful in influencing judgments about deserving families. Wozniak, a former social worker, found that “according to most social workers’ discourses, Euro American people were simply more likely to live in the suburbs, more likely to live a middle-class life, more likely to have an education, more likely to have a male breadwinner who provided a steady income, and thus more likely to provide a ‘good’ home” (Wozniak 2002, 201, emphasis in original). Sociologist Jennifer Reich’s ethnographic study of child welfare agency practices reminds us to think not only about social workers’ perspectives, but also to consider the structural implications of race, class, and gender: “State policies have often judged poor families and families from racial and ethnic minority groups against a white middle-class definition of adequate parenting. Central to this legacy is the reality that most families who rely on public assistance are female-headed. Thus state policies have enforced dominant definitions of gender and what it means to be appropriately maternal” (Reich 2005, 4). Given the power of social workers’ judgments and policies that privilege white middle- and upper-class families over others, it is possible that safe haven babies will move through working- and lower-middle-class foster families before being placed with higher-income adoptive families. The mechanisms through which public, state, and private agencies approve, and thus create, foster and adoptive families expose the privileges and costs that come with having a higher income. Home studies are a part of foster and adoption approval system, and Gailey’s (2010) research found wildly varied options in California. A public agency home study took 12 weeks, requiring a three-hour-per-week training seminar and a payment of around $2,500 (2010, 112). Revealing the other end of the spectrum, in the course of her research, a private agency offered Gailey an “expedited” home study that would cost $10,000 and take two weeks, with no training seminar or home visits. The implication is that those with financial means would not need a home visit or parenting classes. The disparate value of babies by skin color and the financial side of adoption services is the root of the vast differences between public

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and private adoption processes: “Private agencies thrive on the mistrust people with substantial means tend to have about bureaucracies, on the one hand, and, on the other, the long wait for or unavailability of healthy white or ‘acceptably colored’ infants” (Gailey 2010, 113). Private adoption agencies, and those who work with them, participate in sustaining unequal access to adoption based on income. Is it only racism, classism, and the market-based adoption system that drive the unequal costs of adoption? It is not these structural systems of inequality, but rather the decisions of individual birth mothers that create inequities, argues Adam Pertman, the father of two adopted children: One of the most disquieting, rarely discussed truths of the new world of American adoption is that birth mothers are systematically widening the economic gap between themselves and the people who adopt their white children, and are contributing significantly to the creation of a privileged class of well-to-do adoptive families. They’re doing that, quite simply, by choosing what they perceive as the best possible homes for their children. (Pertman 2000, 200)

How can birth mothers be blamed for making this choice, given that a hallmark of a good mother is to give her child more opportunities in life than she had? Pertman agrees with this proposition, and does not present any alternatives to this class-based transition of adoptive babies from women of constrained means to (mainly white) families with financial privilege. Revealing an awareness of, and opposition to, this discourse, one California teenage mother reflected, “For me personally, I don’t have the strength to give my son away for adoption. I wouldn’t be able to do it for any of my kids. Yeah they may be good homes but it’s just the fact that knowing there’s a kid out there that belongs to me” (quoted in Doan and Williams 2008, 157). The transfer of babies from a lower to a higher social status is a primary characteristic of adoption, and one that is most visible in transnational adoptions, which are adoptions that are brokered through private agencies and facilitators. Diana Marre and Laura Briggs, in their introduction to International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children, contextualize transnational adoption within social

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forces including women’s increased workplace participation and “structural infertility” as a result of attempting pregnancy after a career is set (at a time in a woman’s life when her fertility is declining), as well as global structural inequalities that mean adoption is a result of wars and poverty (2009, 16–17). Following the apex of US adoption in the 1950s and early and mid-1960s, after 1970 international adoption by Americans rose (Melosh 2002, 4 and 192). At the same time interracial adoptions (meaning white parents adopting black children) declined (Herman 2008, 252). Historian E. Wayne Carp states outright that recent international adoption is caused by a lack of white US babies: “Because of the dearth of healthy white infants for adoption, 19,458 of adoptions in 2002 were intercountry adoptions, slightly less than half from Russia and China” (2004, 1). Embedded in this statement is an assessment that Russian and Chinese babies, even if not white, remain valued because they are not black. Thus it is more to the point to state that US racism, not a shortage of babies of a certain skin color, facilitated the turn to transnational adoption (see Herman 2008, 252; Briggs 2012). Kathryn Joyce’s book The Child Catchers provides explicit detail about how the Evangelical Christian pro-adoption movement, launched in 2007, encourages adoption through the scriptural imperative that Christians rescue orphans, a population estimated in evangelical circles as between 143 and 210 million children (2013, 61–62). Joyce finds that within transnational Christian adoption streams, many infants and children are labeled orphans even when they are not parentless. The drive to adopt orphans initiates a cycle in which a pool of adoptable children is created followed by corruption and unethical practices in countries that then institute restrictive adoption policies.5 The cycle repeats when a new “hot spot” for international adoption is created (see Dubinsky 2010; Briggs 2012; Joyce 2013; Schwarzschild 2013). The unequal status of adoptable babies clearly is not simply the result of individuals’ preferences, but also reflective of broader social, even global, inequalities structured around racism and classism. A key feature of pro-adoption thinking is that a birth mother, even if present, is not the best person to raise her child; the ideal case is one in which she fully consents to relinquishing her child. Safe haven laws and advocacy of them promote the assumption that a woman or girl, acting of her own volition, freely consents to someone else raising her child. As we have

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seen, addressing and ameliorating the structural and personal reasons she may have for surrendering her infant for adoption in this way are not components of safe haven laws. The focus is on the rare, domestic, adoptable, healthy infant.

How Different Are Safe Haven Adoptions from Other Types of Adoptions? When we view safe havens as a site for newborns to enter adoption systems and not simply, as touted by the laws’ advocates, as a mechanism for saving babies from unsafe abandonment, we must keep in mind questions that are not addressed in safe haven advocacy discourses: what social and economic inequalities lead some women and girls to relinquish newborns anonymously at safe havens rather than through planned adoption arrangements, and what do safe haven moms give up that other birth mothers retain? To attempt to explore these questions, we need to know how different safe haven adoptions are from other types of adoptions and what the consequences are of these differences. In fact, it is not easy to answer these questions because safe haven relinquishers are silent. Instead, we hear the perspectives of those who adopt safe haven babies. Speaking as an adoptive father, a firefighter, and a safe haven responder, a simple comparison captures a main difference in safe haven versus planned adoptions: “We wanted to adopt, but adopting a Safe Surrender baby was even better” (quoted in Knabe 2011). The superlative value of safe haven infants is demonstrated not only in their rarity, but also in reports about the outpouring of interest in adopting specific babies when their cases are covered in the news. The parentless, innocent, healthy, vulnerable baby in need of care captures wide attention. Safe haven adoption can also appear to be a way around prolonged waiting for legal adoption status or the pain that comes when a birth mother reclaims her infant after the baby has been cared for by a foster family that wants to adopt it. Media stories and safe haven advocates work to dispel the assumption that a safe haven adoption is simple by spelling out the foster-adoption process, and yet, due to adoption agerace-health hierarchies and the pull of the rescue narrative, safe haven babies are in high demand because they occupy a unique place in the adoption landscape.

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The exceptionally high interest in safe haven babies is well documented. The San Antonio Express-News announced that following reports of an abandoned baby two years after the 1999 state law was passed, “calls came pouring in to the local Child Protective Services office” by people seeking to adopt Baby Isabella, who was named by nurses at the hospital where she was born (Garza 2001). The newspaper warned, “but Baby Isabella isn’t available for adoption to the general public” (Garza 2001). The baby was a “healthy 7-plus pounds” and left alone when the mother left the hospital before being discharged. As the media reported, “the woman . . . left a handwritten note stating she was giving up her rights to the baby. ‘Please forgive me, but this is best for her’” (Garza 2001). Perhaps the more than 270 calls by interested adoptive parents were motivated by the mother’s demonstration of regret leaving her child, her written statement relinquishing maternal rights, the orphanhood of a healthy newborn, or a combination of these circumstances. The article went on to explain that only preapproved foster and adoption homes are considered by the agency. Four months later, the newborn’s foster parents became her adoptive parents and asked the media not to print the baby’s new name or their names, “expressing fear that the birth mother might come looking for their child” (Russell 2001). These adoptive parents were aware that she was motherless only within her legal status as a safe haven baby; her biological mother did exist. The desirability of safe haven babies was emphasized by a New Hampshire politician who sponsored that state’s safe haven bill, when she commented on a one-week-old boy surrendered at a hospital emergency room. Indicative of the rarity of safe haven babies, the state law was passed in 2003 and this baby’s 2012 surrender was only the third in the state. The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for placing the child in foster care pending adoption, and former Rep. Phyllis Woods commented, “I think their phone must be ringing off the hook,” adding, “I’m sure this had to have been a difficult, gut-wrenching situation for the mother” (quoted in Cousineau 2012). This attitude emphasizes that newborns surrendered to safe havens are cherished resources in a domestic adoption context within which healthy newborns are rare. Safe haven advocacy programs have been inundated by adoption requests. In Houston, a hotline fielded calls by over 700 people, nearly all of

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whom were interested in adopting a safe haven newborn; not one caller was considering abandonment (Grossman 2002). Florida’s A Safe Haven for Babies organization attempts to head off the “phone ringing off the hook” phenomenon, advising on its website’s “About Adoptions” tab: We receive so many requests to adopt a “Safe Haven” baby. Realistically, it is virtually impossible to ask for and expect to adopt one of these children unless you are already approved and registered with a participating Adoption Agency that receives a “Safe Haven” baby. The adoption process is regulated by the State of Florida and is the same process for all children that are placed with adoption agencies. (A Safe Haven for Newborns 2013a)6

Safe haven infants are cared for by state agencies or subcontracting private agencies, with variation state-to-state on the specific legal requirements. A Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (2013) fact sheet reiterates the guarantee of a “loving adoptive family” for a safe haven baby: “When a baby is left at the hospital, he or she is in safe hands. A doctor will examine the baby and provide any medical care needed. Then, the local county children and youth agency will take custody of the baby and find him or her a loving family.” This summary downplays the many procedures that must take place before a safe haven baby is adopted and emphasizes love as the central feature of the adoptive home, overlooking that class and race privilege create adoptive homes too. In all states, safe haven procedures require an infant to be transferred from the safe haven site to a hospital for a medical checkup, and in most states the responders contact the state’s child welfare department. The department or a lawyer petitions the court for termination of parental rights and places the infant in a preadoptive home, as described on the information-rich Adoption.com Infant Safe Haven Laws page (2013). In some states, including Illinois, Florida, and Arizona, licensed childplacing agencies, and not state agencies, handle adoptions.7 Safe haven babies are distributed to licensed agencies that are contacted on a rotating basis in Illinois, as cited on the National Safe Haven Alliance “About the Illinois Law” page (n.d.b). Florida’s safe haven law requires safe haven babies to be released to a licensed child-placing agency from a list

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of state-approved adoption agencies; thus, in the words of advocate Nick Silverio, keeping “state child welfare investigators and police out of the dynamic” (Cambria 2012). This statement is meant to reassure women that they will not be subject to child protective agency or police scrutiny if they relinquish an unharmed infant at a safe haven. It also underlines the view that private adoption networks, working outside of the purview of the state, are best, which in turn benefits financially well-off adopters. Adoptee rights advocates direct attention to the fact that safe haven laws are simply a form of adoption law and contend that broader adoption politics are thoroughly implicated in the safe haven newborn placement system. They argue that safe haven laws undermine the reforms that they have lobbied for and won, specifically policies dealing with unsealed records and open adoption. Blogger and adoptee rights activist Marley Greiner, in The Daily Bastardette, points out the financial incentives involved when private agencies, instead of state agencies, handle safe haven adoptions: Remember that in Florida, babies dumped off at “safe have” stations do not, as in most other states, go through the state system.8 Instead, they are channeled for adoption directly through private agencies, which in turn charge hefty fees for placement of documentless infants. (2011)

All Florida adoptions are managed by private agencies, and what stands out about safe haven babies within this context is their high worth to the placement agency because they are both healthy newborns and unattached to birth parents. Individuals and agencies alike reap the financial and moral benefits of this form of baby rescue. In this safe haven adoption protocol, the classed and raced systems themselves, not only individuals, support adoption inequalities. Another central aspect of laws governing planned adoptions versus safe haven adoptions is the time period and process for the relinquishing of parental rights. State laws on planned adoptions differ. At one extreme, in some states, when the birth mother signs legal documents the relinquishment is final, and at the other extreme, California law stipulates that the adoption is not final until six months after the birth mother signs the documents (Melosh 2002, 280–81). Parental rights are a hotly contested aspect of adoption policy, and at the time safe haven

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laws were passed, policies tipped the balance away from biological parental rights toward adoptive parental rights. Federal adoption reform in the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, passed just two years before Texas implemented the first safe haven law, “aimed to provide children with safe homes where they could remain permanently, even as it created additional hurdles for biological parents to overcome in order to maintain their parental rights” (Reich 2005, 3). Although it may seem counterintuitive, under safe haven laws the termination of parental rights cannot be granted immediately even though the baby is relinquished anonymously. Safe haven laws anticipate birth parents seeking to reunite with a relinquished infant, and Silverio reports that in the Florida law’s 11 years, only four babies were reclaimed, most often because a birth mother was urged to do so by family members (see Taylor 2011). In 18 states there is a specific procedure that allows a surrendered infant to be reclaimed within a specified time period that is before a petition is filed to terminate parental rights.9 State guidelines address the question of whether the infant was abducted and deposited at a safe haven, mandating that law enforcement agencies investigate missing child reports. A less-discussed safe haven legal issue is paternal rights. Four states’ policies reflect concern about whether the father of the infant may seek custody, and require welfare departments to check the putative father registry (Illinois, Missouri, Utah, and Wyoming) (Adoption.com 2013). The nonrelinquishing father can petition for custody in Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, and Tennessee. Tennessee officials in 2006 stressed that “The state does have an obligation to search for the father or other relative of the child before it can go forward with an adoption” and that “Our first goal is reunification of this baby with her family . . . We want to see if we can fix whatever is wrong’” (Rob Johnson and Stacy Miller, quoted respectively in Wolff 2006). This prioritizing of the biological family is not found in many other state laws. Indeed, the opposite is true in the laws of twelve states where “the act of surrendering an infant to a safe haven is presumed to be a relinquishment of parental rights to the child, and no further parental consent is required for the child’s adoption” (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2013). In all states, the legal requirement for a biological mother to reclaim her baby is a parenting assessment by state agencies. The message is that

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a mother who relinquishes her infant must be tested because she may not be a good-enough parent in the eyes of the state. This runs counter to the discourse that maternal love drives safe haven relinquishments; the question becomes, if she loved her baby so much, why did she relinquish it only to later reconsider? A positive take on the state’s investigation is that it may result in providing resources that could enhance the mother’s support. A negative take is that any woman who surrenders her baby, for whatever reason, is under suspicion as an inadequate mother. Link this to the adoption hierarchy in which it is assumed that safe haven babies will be “adopted up” in the class system, and we see that the safe haven mother is competing against adoptive parents with the measure being who will provide the best life for the newborn. It follows that the ideal safe haven mom is one who remains anonymous and relinquishes motherhood with the understanding that her newborn will be better off raised by a stranger. This logic chain perpetuates the narrow safe haven focus on the newborn and avoids facing the reproductive justice imperative that forces us to also consider whether the safe haven mom, if provided with resources, would opt to raise her baby.

The Illusion of Motherless Infants Although safe haven adoptions are US-based and take place at the state level, the illusion of the motherless infant in safe haven adoptions means that they resonate more closely with the circumstances of international adoptions.10 Planned, open adoption has been the expected preference for domestic adoptions in the United States since the 1980s (see Siegel 2006; Melosh 2002, 277–79), and many adoption facilitators allow birth mothers to select an adoptive family and to make arrangements to maintain some contact with the child or her/his adoptive family.11 The term “open adoption” applies to a number of situations and is defined differently by scholars, activists, and practitioners. An open adoption may mean: face-to-face contact between the child and birth parent; the possibility of such contact; contact between the adoptive parents and any birth family member; contact, such as letters, facilitated through an agency or lawyer that may be anonymous; or sharing identifying information or a meeting between the birth mother and adoptive parents at the time of adoption (Siegel 2006, 178). Deborah Siegel writes that there

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“is an endless variety of open adoption forms” (Siegel 2006, 179), and Kathryn Joyce warns that open adoption has an “unstable legal footing” because such contracts are not enforceable in most states (2013, 117; see also Jones 1993; Herman 2008, 290). Running counter to open adoption, both safe haven and international adoption processes share a legal fiction about the baby as a parentless orphan, and subsequently advance a rescue narrative. Writing about international adoption, but also applicable to safe haven adoption, anthropologist Christine Ward Gailey notes, “the myth of the orphan, made real through the legal erasure of the birth parents, makes it easier for adopters to commit to their children” (2010, 111; see also Yngvesson 2002; Ortiz and Briggs 2003; Dorow 2006; Joyce 2013). This may be positive because the facilitation of a bond between adoptive parents and their adopted baby is healthy, but the primary negative consequence is the oversimplification of the birth mother’s (and father’s) experiences or a studied exclusion of their importance. For example, when asked about what to tell his child about her birth mother, one father Gailey interviewed, who had adopted a girl from China, said, “the best thing would be to say that her mother loved her and wanted her to get a loving family” (2010, 109). This perspective echoes the sentiments embedded in safe haven discourses and positions the birth mother as a well-intentioned, selfless gift-giver. More pointedly, Joyce writes that the mainstream view of adoption as a win-win situation dismisses birth mothers’ experiences and even their bodies altogether. This is revealed in remarks from celebrity adoptive parents, including LGBT adoption advocate Rosie O’Donnell, “who has written that she told her adopted son that God mistakenly put him in another woman’s womb,” and actress Edie Falco, who in a 2012 CNN interview announced, “the second you are handed a newborn it is yours. It doesn’t matter what body it came out of ” (Joyce 2013, 95). Illustrating Falco’s point, an adoptive mother of a safe haven baby remembers when she received a call from a social worker asking if she wanted to meet a newborn baby girl who had been surrendered when 18 hours old in Whittier, California. The woman’s reply, through her joyful tears, was, “That’s my daughter, when can I go get her?” (Knabe 2011). Birth mothers are vessels in these statements, which express feelings that elevate the social act of adoptive motherhood while demoting the biological acts of

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pregnancy and birth. In planned adoption or safe haven relinquishment, when the birth mother’s experience is made invisible the opportunity to understand how the conditions of some women’s lives, grounded in economic and social disparities, led them to surrender motherhood is lost. Even though birth mothers are framed in this way by some adoptive parents and mainstream discourses, the well-being of the birth mother as a feeling, thinking, and acting person is considered in most adoption policy discussions. There is evidence that birth mothers resolve grief about relinquishing a child more effectively in an open rather than a closed adoption (see Jones 1993; Siegel 2006, 183). However, there remains a pull by many adoptive parents to closed or transnational adoption, stemming from a fear that adopted children will be reclaimed by biological family members (Melosh 2002, 193; Dubinsky 2010; Joyce 2013). Model safe haven adoptions are premised on the anonymity of the birth mother, and fulfill the fantasy of the parentless infant in a US legal context that is dominated by open adoption. A key feature of the illusion of the parentless infant narrative in either domestic or international settings is that the baby was rescued from death or from a poor and unhappy life. Sociologist Heather Jacobson (2008) argues that in the first half of the twentieth century, the “humanitarian” framing of international adoption is “no longer totally accepted in the larger adoption community as an appropriate motivation for bringing a child into one’s home. Narratives of rescue hide how power and privilege influence which mothers have been able to raise the children they bear and which have been able to adopt” (Jacobson 2008, 31; see also Patton 2000; Roberts 2001). The rescue narrative, however, remains central to Christian discourses about solving the so-called orphan crisis, and some of the largest adoption agencies, including Bethany Christian Services and Holt International, are invested in saving babies’ souls through a humanitarian mission that answers directly to God (Joyce 2013). Rescue language is amplified when adoption is framed as rescuing newborns specifically from abandonment and the risk of death. Capitalizing on the attraction of rescue discourses, the California-based, self-identified “infant abandonment prevention” organization Project Cuddle, often cited in safe haven advocacy stories although it has not consistently endorsed safe haven laws, facilitates adoption and labels

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adoptive families as rescue families. Project Cuddle is an example of a “pregnancy resource center”—an alternate term for an antiabortion “crisis pregnancy center” (Kaufman 2006; Belluck 2013; Joyce 2013). The group’s website at “How You Can Help” has a Facebook funding appeal for phone cards, women’s toiletries, and gift cards; it also announces that $2,500 is the amount needed to “save a baby through Project Cuddle.” The assistance provided by Project Cuddle mainly targets teenagers, and the organization states that many of the girls served have had “negative experiences with ‘the system’ and are unwilling to seek assistance from social services agencies” (Magnusen 2001/2002, 27). Within this focus is a criticism of the state’s foster care and adoption systems, and, remarkably, half of the young women Project Cuddle assists were adopted or raised in the foster care system (Magnusen 2001/2002, 27). This reinforces the group’s belief that nonprofit and private services are preferable to the states’, and underscores that in Project Cuddle’s view, both pregnant women and their newborns are in need of rescue. This dual perspective is a step beyond the limited view of safe have laws’ focus only on newborns; however, a primary activity of Project Cuddle is transferring newborns from teens to “rescue parents,” and their pro-adoption message is packaged with a “save abandoned babies” theme. The rescue narrative is deployed in more specific terms when it addresses transracial adoption. In her book on transracial adoption, Sandra Patton demonstrates the racialized aspects of the narrative: “In the standard formula, White middle-class families are repeatedly cast as the bearers of traditional ‘family values,’ the only possible salvation for the ‘at risk’ child—variously signified by neglect, abuse, HIV or AIDS, drug exposure, and frequently racial ‘otherness’” (2000, 5). An example from a news story arguing for safe haven laws assumes that safe haven adoption can prevent inner-city violence. A journalist notes that as Michigan legislators debated passing a safe haven law, one abandoned infant froze to death on church steps and another was rescued from a trash bin. She goes on to voice support for this law because it will redistribute children from irresponsible to upstanding families, citing a hair-raising case: Something else makes this legislation look good now. Local authorities are searching for ways to respond to the shooting of 6-year-old Kayla Rolland. The Mt. Morris first-grader was fatally shot by a 6-year-old class-

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mate [Dedrick Owens] who might have been better off if he’d been left at a police station, hospital or fire station. Maybe then he wouldn’t have wound up in a house where he could find a loaded .32-caliber handgun. (DeRamus 2000)

Owens’s distressing family life and unsafe surroundings are highlighted, and assumptions about proper parenting and racism underscore this case: Kayla Rolland was white and Dedrick Owens black. In this reporting, the attraction of the hypothetical safe haven rescue of Owens is grounded in a string of loaded connections about adoption as a middleclass white phenomenon and violence as an impoverished, black phenomenon. In this rendition, imagining a safe haven rescue rewrites the past to save Kayla’s life. Moving in a different direction, the invisibility of the safe haven mom in adoptions means that safe haven families can rewrite their newborn’s future. Adoptive parents may imagine how much worse the child’s life would have been if the birth mother had raised her or him, even lacking evidence about whether or not that would have been the case. The invisibility of the safe haven mom may appeal particularly to adoptive parents who do not wish to participate in the expected adoption exercise of presenting themselves to birth mothers. Open adoption practices place birth mothers in the position of choosing their newborn’s future family based on “Dear Birth Mother” letters, application files that include photos of potential adoptive families and even interviews (see Melosh 2002, 279–80). Open adoption activist Betty Jean Lifton writes about the shock of the transformation of the birth mother’s status from extremely low to “a royal personage, courted by adoption lawyers . . . ; by adoption agencies; and by infertile couples” due to open adoption policy changes and the “healthy white baby shortage” starting in the mid 1980s (2009, 74). Judith Modell points out that “The importance of this reversal is unmistakable in the context of a phrase that is nearly cognate with ‘gift,’ giving up” (1999, 49). When birth mothers give the gift of their newborn to a family they have chosen, their power is enhanced symbolically through the suggestion of a giver-receiver relationship between themselves and the adoptive parents, one defined by expected continued gratitude on the part of the adoptive party (Modell 1994, 1999; Yngvesson 2002). In a memoir by an adoptive mother, the power reversal is

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responded to in a fake birth mother letter representing perspectives not admissible in the real, carefully scripted letters that are an integral part of today’s planned adoption process: “Dear Birth Mother: Screw you. Do you think I want to beg a complete stranger for a kid whose own mother doesn’t want him? You messed up and now you get to sit in judgment of the perfect parents for your baby” (quoted in Melosh 2002, 280). The anger expressed here supports framing birth mothers as “tummy mummies” who have little to offer a baby. Birth mothers sense this negative feeling, and one has an equally angry reply: “If they think we’re such trash, why do they take our babies?” (quoted in Modell 1994, 89; see also Jones 1993; Gritter 2000). Project Cuddle facilitates open adoptions with birth mothers appearing to be in charge, as seen in descriptions on the organization’s website and in two books by founder Debbe Magnusen that document diverse pregnant women talking with and meeting eager rescue families.12 Some teenagers are represented by Project Cuddle’s founder as not invested in the decision; for example: “She just wanted to find a family and get it over with. New Year’s was fast approaching and she was determined to get this baby out in time to celebrate” (Magnusen 2002, 40). On the opposite side, Magunsen presents the problem of a picky pregnant teen: “She was very specific about the family she wanted. She was looking for a family that would be willing to stay in touch with her through letters and photos . . . The other key thing that Mandy was looking for in a family was that they were vegetarians. This was something Mandy was emphatic about”—and it created problems because no one in their Dear Birth Mother letters indicated that they were vegetarian (Magnusen 2002, 105). Both the partier and the vegetarian had the power to make decisions about their baby’s future on their own terms even though in the broader social structure, these young women have less social and economic power than the adoptive parents they screened. Adoptive parents, of course, cannot be selected by newborns themselves, and must be judged by one or more intermediaries, including a birth mother, social worker, or adoption agency staff member. The birth mother’s power to select an adoptive family remains rooted in an ideal that the mother has a right to determine what is in the best interests of her child and carries an expectation that she will make a good choice despite her relinquishment of her right to mother that child. It also so-

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lidifies that she fully consented, by having the power of choice, to surrendering her child. A birth mother’s use of a safe haven eliminates her ability to select an adoptive family for her newborn but retains the assumption that relinquishment is the right choice. The safe haven mother has less symbolic and practical power than the birth mother who uses planned adoption because she cannot choose an adoptive family, and, due to anonymity, cannot reunify with her child in the future. She is invisible. This invisibility and lack of power should alarm us because it reveals that the social, economic, and reproductive injustices that compel safe haven use go unquestioned by safe haven proponents. In this way, safe haven laws support the status quo system in which some women are targeted as safe haven users because they fit the marginalized stereotype of the safe haven mom.

The Creation of Successful Safe Haven Families It is the act of a specific type of birth mother, the “safe haven mom,” who creates a “safe haven family” by anonymously and safely relinquishing her newborn. Although she is invisible, adoptive parents often praise safe haven moms for doing the right thing by relinquishing their newborns. In the underlying messages that circulate in narratives about the value of safe haven babies, adoptive families focus on the key moment when the safe haven mom relinquished her newborn, making it possible for the baby’s life to be both saved and enhanced by others. At the same time, there is scant attention to the circumstances of the baby’s birth or the life conditions and social disparities that shaped the safe haven mom’s relinquishment decision. As we have seen, safe haven adoption, like international and other domestic adoptions, must be viewed within the context of discussions about transracial adoptions and the racial hierarchies that categorize adoptable infants by their appearance. Racism and classism work together in our society to produce both more and less valued biological mothers and adoptive newborns. Reproductive justice advocates point out that women of color without financial means are automatically assumed to be bad mothers. Further, safe haven campaigns rely on stigmatizing teen pregnancy discourses, perpetuating stereotypes of members of marginalized population. We do not get to see photos of safe haven

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moms, and safe haven advocacy organizations’ representations of babies and their adoptive families are eye-catching because they represent transracial adoptions as normal and desirable. The National Safe Haven Alliance homepage (n.d.a) features a photo of a white woman with long blond hair and a white man sitting against a tree with autumn colors around, both smiling at the young toddler standing near their legs. The man has an arm around the woman and one hand on the head of the child, who has brown skin and very short, dark hair. The visual message is that the white parents and the brown-skinned toddler are a loving, transracial family. Another example supporting transracial adoption comes from a Milwaukee Fox 6 Now news story on the second annual Safe Haven Baby Parade and Walk fundraiser (Bee 2012). It featured an interview with a white woman, Tricia Burkett, the coordinator of Safe Place for Newborns in Wisconsin, with her quiet and squirmy black preschool-age daughter. As a newborn, the girl was a safe haven baby placed in the foster care system in Milwaukee and adopted by Burkett, who is apparently single. The white woman interviewer concludes the segment by pointing to the girl and saying, “and what a great cause.” This offhand comment to support the fundraiser also suggests the rescue narrative, in which a single white woman adopts a black baby in a city segregated by race and class, uplifting the child’s future. The Wisconsin safe haven organization features photos that reveal that a majority of safe haven babies are black and their adoptive families are not. The organization is located in a Catholic hospital, and its newsletter features events, fundraising, and lobbying. The first newsletter issue of 2012 featured a cover page photo of safe haven families gathered on a playground. The five babies and toddlers are black, and one of the eight parents pictured is black (additionally, one father I read as multiracial and may identify as black). Diversity is present in other ways, with what appears to be an Asian American lesbian couple with their black daughter.13 None of the families featured include two black parents. Although this photo cannot stand for the whole of Wisconsin’s safe haven families, it does reflect one moment in this organization’s self-representation. (All of the adults in the photo are smiling, but none of the children are, perhaps simply because they were prohibited from playing during the photo shoot.)

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Clearly, the broader politics of transracial adoption shapes safe haven families. Dorothy Roberts provides evidence that strong proponents of the 1990s adoption reforms to implement color-blind adoption placements argued specifically for the right of white parents to adopt black children as a way to fix the foster care problem, characterized by an overrepresentation of black children (2001, 167–68; see also Quiroz 2007). Visually, we see in safe haven advocacy the effect of such reforms, and, in this Milwaukee example, we see only black safe haven babies. On other advocacy websites, safe haven families are presented with varying types of diversity. The Illinois Save Abandoned Babies website posted a video posted that features white lesbian mothers, each sporting short, straight, graying hair, and their brown, likely Latina, toddler. The girl had been dropped off at a safe haven site when she was two hours old on a Sunday evening, then named Baby Sunday at the hospital. A white single father and his white safe haven daughter, Molly, also appear in the video. One screen shot shows a woman’s finger pointing at a handwritten list in a notebook of crisis pregnancy centers with some crossed out. This implies that Molly’s mother responsibly searched for assistance and did not consider abortion as an option. Molly’s father says haltingly, “all we know is she has to, that she had to have loved Molly, because to go through this loving sacrifice, um, uh, shows how much she did, and she must be darned cute, because [laughing] Molly is.” His stumbling over whether Molly’s biological mother still loves her and his humor about the genetic cuteness link indicate a sense of discomfort, though the video overall celebrates a range of safe haven success stories. The reasons why the babies’ mothers opted for safe haven are not suggested, and we are left with the message that relinquishment is a loving act and that some types of nontraditional families can happily raise safe haven babies. We can celebrate that safe haven organizations recognize these diverse families, but we must also wonder about the erasure of family forms that could support a teenage mother and her child so that she would not need to make a relinquishment decision. There is particular power in media stories that have multiple angles on how safe haven laws create families. One example is an Idaho woman’s professional, advocacy, and personal experiences that led her to adopt a safe haven newborn. A news story following up on the safe haven law ten years after its implementation notes that 20 infants were saved under the

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Idaho law and focuses on Suzanne Hobbs, a white woman and former TV reporter who warns, “watching a baby be pulled from a Dumpster is not something you ever want to see” (quoted in Scardino 2011). As a reporter, Hobbs was at the crime scene when the body of an 18-year-old’s infant was retrieved from an Idaho Falls dumpster. Hobbs was married and trying to get pregnant at the time and reacted personally, stating on the Oprah Winfrey Show’s episode on safe haven laws, “to see someone do that to a baby that maybe I could have had, that was very difficult” (“All-American Tragedy” 2006). Hobbs is credited with suggesting to an Idaho senator the need for a safe haven law. She stated that the idea came from the 18-year-old girl’s father, who told Hobbs in an interview that he had heard of other states’ safe haven laws and thought that his daughter could have saved her baby. In 2001, the law was passed in six months, and by 2003, she tells the Oprah audience, she was “on the list for adoption, to adopt a child.” Hobbs envisioned a personal benefit from the safe haven law that she initiated. The Idaho news story continues, “two years after the safe haven law went into effect, Hobbs received a call out of the blue. ‘I had expected it to take years to find a baby to adopt . . . Then, all of a sudden we were told to go buy a car seat and pick up a baby girl that a mother abandoned at the hospital’” (quoted in Scardino 2011). Lilly was the fifth Idaho safe haven baby, and has light skin, wavy light brown hair, and dark brown eyes. In her photo displayed on the Oprah show, she looks like a racematch with Hobbs. The news story emphasizes that Lilly and her mother are open about her adoption: Hobbs asks Lilly where she came from. Without hesitation, the girl responds. “I came from my tummy mommy,” Lilly said, without blinking an eye. Hobbs followed up with, “Wasn’t that nice of her to share you with me.” (Scardino 2011)

In this narrative, Hobbs implies that safe haven laws allow deserving people, such as herself, to raise babies when their birth mothers are nice enough to share their babies. But the sharing is not equitable; the anonymity of the birth mother is a feature of safe haven adoption that can be particularly attractive. Further, one cannot help but think that

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Hobbs’s publicized trauma of seeing a “dumpster baby” at a time she faced fertility problems and her safe haven activism entitled her to a safe haven baby, which, in turn, boosted her media activism promoting the law. Other forms of successful safe haven families are portrayed in news articles that seek to publicize safe haven laws. A 2011 feature about a couple who adopted two safe haven infants two years apart in the Los Angeles area is the only story of its kind that my research uncovered. Indeed, the adoptive father claims his as “the only family to adopt two children through Safe Haven in the ten year history of the program” (“Christmas Eve Baby Surrendered Under Safe Haven Law is Adopted” 2011). The Prinkki family had adopted two other children—one was a 2009 safe haven baby—and had two biological children. In a gesture to mark the baby’s safe haven identity, the family christened the baby Noel Rene, keeping the name “Noel” that LA firefighters gave the baby when he was surrendered by his mother. Going a step further in their praise of safe havens babies, the Prinkkis released advocacy statements on behalf of safe haven laws: “We want to shine a light on this program and begin a renewed public interest and dialogue to let people know Safe Haven works . . . We are living evidence that the Safe Haven Program works” (“Christmas Eve Baby Surrendered Under Safe Haven Law is Adopted” 2011). In short, the safe haven family is made possible only by women’s use of the law. Another news story about a successful safe haven adoption does not overtly advocate for safe haven laws and shows particular compassion for the baby’s birth mother. This story too focuses on a race-matched adoptive couple and newborn. The article appeared in a New Orleans newspaper on December 23 and has a feel-good holiday theme, focusing on a black couple, Ivan and Sheila Ledet, and their chubby four-monthold foster daughter, Arianna, who is also black and who was handed to paramedics in a restaurant parking lot by her biological mother (Hunter 2007). Arianna was the sixth safe haven baby in Louisiana, which passed its safe haven law seven years before she was born. The law is referred to in the story as “an underused statute.” Reports stated that Arianna’s mother was in her early twenties and gave birth at home. She had learned about the safe haven law from an Internet search, put the hoursold baby in the front seat of a sports utility vehicle, and, while sobbing, drove until she saw the paramedics and asked them to take the baby:

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All they know about her comes from a single newspaper article printed a few days after the incident. But the Ledets said they’ll have at least one reassuring thing they eventually can tell Arianna, now 4 months old: Her mother loved her dearly. “If you look for a place, a safe haven, to me, that characterizes love,” Ivan Ledet said. “You can’t say she didn’t love her.” (Hunter 2007)

The news account imbues all safe haven babies with love, and Ivan Ledet stresses the importance of this for his daughter’s future positive sense of herself. The Ledets were newborn Arianna’s foster family, and five months later expected to complete adoption paperwork and attend a formal court hearing. The journalist contends, “and while the Ledets can only guess at the circumstances that compelled a young mother to give up a healthy baby, Ivan Ledet said he is firmly convinced that Arianna’s birth was ‘divinely appointed’” (Hunter 2007). In other words, the biological mother’s suffering and love for her daughter, as evidenced by her intention to use the safe haven law and tears at the time of relinquishment, were meant to be so that Arianna could find her place as a member of the Ledet family. An explanation is not provided for why this safe haven mother’s place in life was to suffer. We learn that the Ledets themselves had a difficult route to adoption. The couple was married for 15 years, and despite trying to conceive, “Sheila Ledet was diagnosed with ovarian failure” (Hunter 2007). Although her infertility was “heart-wrenching” Shelia had “wanted to adopt a child since she was a youngster,” and after seeing a state TV ad urging families to adopt, she received paperwork from the Department of Social Services. The couple kept busy, he as a pastor and she as a worker at an electrical company. Starting the state approval process, they took a six-week training course, completed a home inspection, and earned a foster-adoptive family certificate. Three months later, they adopted Diamond, a five-year-old girl, “but they still wanted to adopt an infant, something the caseworker who handled Diamond’s adoption knew well. And that’s why she called them on the afternoon of July 29 to tell them about a newborn baby girl” (Hunter 2007). This suggests that the couple gained the chance to adopt a newborn by first adopting an older black foster child who was in need of a home and was more difficult to place than an infant.

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The newborn was not identified as a safe haven baby when the caseworker called the Ledets, and Shelia had doubts because she knew that, in the words of the journalist, “quite a few of the children who make their way into the state’s foster care system have been taken from unstable situations, possibly exposed to drugs or emotional and physical abuse. Some have physical disabilities or mental illnesses” (Hunter 2007). The safe haven baby checkup promotes these relinquished infants to the top of the adoption hierarchy: they are healthy and young. When the Ledets first saw her, the baby was asleep in the pediatric intensive care unit of Children’s Hospital and Shelia gushed, “She was just perfect . . . This perfect little thing just sleeping there. She was beautiful. The most beautiful little baby I’d ever seen. How could anybody walk away from something so beautiful?” Perhaps it was this thought that made Shelia worry that Arianna’s birth mother would attempt to reclaim her parental rights, which she could do within a 30-day period. She did not, and yet, still, the Ledets realize that she must be wondering whether her baby is all right, whether she is happy and whether she is loved. They want to assure Arianna’s biological mother that her daughter is doing fine . . . “Thank you,” Ivan Ledet said he’d tell the woman. And when Arianna’s old enough, the couple said they’ll give her the newspaper articles and tell her that her mother loved her. And if she ever wants to find her mother, Sheila Ledet said they’ll spare no expense in helping her do so. “It probably would be very hard, but we’ll do whatever it takes to help her find her place of peace.” (Hunter 2007)

The Ledet family story ends on an upbeat message of understanding for the loss both Arianna and her biological mother may feel due to their severed relationship, and carries a warning about downside of safe haven laws’ anonymity requirement. Perhaps drawing on black histories of enslavement and the forced separation of mothers and babies as well as popular discourses about adoption in an era when open adoption is the dominant model, Shelia assumes that Arianna’s “place of peace” may include searching for her biological mother (see Lifton 2009). Although the use of the safe haven law is framed as having saved the newborn’s life, her mother’s act also will bring her pain.

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Another type of cautionary note is sounded at the end of the article when the reporter offers insight into how safe haven babies are placed in Louisiana: Arianna’s story this summer likely drew the attention of many New Orleans area residents interested in adopting the baby. State Adoption Administrator Bruce Daniels said it’s incorrect to think of their adoption process as a waiting list. The department, he said, is not in the business of simply finding children for interested families like a shopper searching for a coat. “The children are the customers. The family is a resource.” (Hunter 2007)

Invoking the historical framing of child welfare systems as being childcentered, this administrator directly challenges the idea that adoptive families are the ones served by adoption. The shopping analogy emphasizes that families do not—or should not—have consumer choice about which babies they adopt through the state system, even though framing adoptees as customers misrepresents the power that children have in their adoptions. This is a jab at how private adoption agencies’ systems sustain consumerist expectations among potential adopting families. Echoing Shelia Ledet’s anticipation that her daughter will feel a need to search for her birth mother, a California adoptive mother, Wendy Eisenberg, goes a step further, comparing the risks of safe haven adoption and open adoption. Nothing is known of her son Jason’s birthparents or of his genetic health history; although California law requires that medical and family background paperwork be handed to the person relinquishing an infant, legally it need not be filled out. Wendy states that Jason is part of an adoption play group, knows he is adopted, and will want to know his story one day. She sounds wistful as she observes, “the law provides another option to birth parents, but can leave behind children who will always have questions about their past” (Fontana and Correa 2009). This view suggests that by working outside of standard adoption procedures, relinquishing mothers do not do enough to ensure the best future for their babies. Both Sheila Ledet and Wendy Eisenberg voice concerns that align with the argument that open records adoptions are healthier for children’s emotional well-being, in keeping with dominant adoption reform advocacy discourses and adoption practices

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in the United States since the 1980s (see Carp 1998, 2002, 2004; Melosh 2002; Lifton 2009). Perhaps also it is easier for safe haven families to voice their preference for open adoption practices when they know there is no chance that a birth mother will reenter their lives. One Connecticut safe haven family praised the state’s law while at the same time seeking to ensure that the birth mother could not make contact with them. The baby had been born in a hospital, treated medically, and then relinquished under the state’s safe haven law. Dottie, the adoptive mother, remembered that she and her husband “‘both felt like we had just won a million dollar lottery.’ I’m very, very grateful the Safe Havens law exists’” (quoted in Alix 2008). Dottie and her husband would not identify their last names or where they live. Dottie explained that the safe haven baby’s biological mother “remains anonymous . . . She’s protected by the Safe Havens law,” but Dottie’s concern about privacy suggests that she herself feels unprotected because the safe haven mom might become visible (quoted in Alix 2008). Although each of these safe haven families’ stories contain, on balance, emphatic endorsement and mild criticism of safe haven laws, other accounts simply celebrate successful families and highlight the value of safe haven adoption. In these stories, the safe haven baby has worth both as an individual and as a family-maker. As we have seen, one forum for advancing this message is anniversary celebrations of safe haven laws featuring politicians, activists, and safe haven babies. The eighth anniversary celebration of Indiana’s safe haven law featured the blonde, white, “bright-eyed 4-year-old Natalie Hammond” touting the “state law that quite possibly saved the Fort Wayne girl’s life” (Kelly 2008). A threeyear-old redhead with pale skin who was relinquished through the safe haven law also attended. At the event, Lieutenant Governor Becky Skillman stated, “these children might have met a heartbreaking fate” (Kelly 2008). The reiteration of the threat of newborn death by abandonment is cited as the only other possible outcome, and the celebration leaves to one side the possibility that the safe haven moms wished they could have raised their babies—a perspective that would broaden attention to the conditions in women’s lives that produce safe haven babies. The story goes on to present Natalie’s safe haven story. In 2004 a university student contacted the safe haven hotline, delivered the child on

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her own, and “dropped her off at Parkview North Hospital. Within days, Natalie was adopted by Roy and Theresa Hammond of Fort Wayne . . . who were licensed foster parents looking to adopt after enduring multiple miscarriages . . . ‘It’s just been a blessing,’ Theresa Hammond said. ‘God knew what was in our hearts. It’s always on his timing’” (Kelly 2008). Natalie’s birth mother was a white university student; thus Natalie was a top-ranked adoptive baby in the race-class adoption system hierarchy. A component of Natalie’s birth story that stands out is that her birth mother reportedly called a safe haven hotline, but then had no support during childbirth, which she experienced alone. The story emphasizes the product, the healthy baby, without attention to the conditions of the birth mother’s experiences, which, as we have seen, promotes the myth of the motherless safe haven baby and devalues women’s reproductive decision-making. In the context of a celebratory adoption ceremony, a Milwaukee story emphasized how successful the Wisconsin safe haven program is, profiling the good fortune for both a black safe haven baby and a white adoptive couple pictured in the story (Sting 2009). The baby’s sad separation from his teenage mother is juxtaposed with the adoption: “It was a joyous ceremony of family and love that contrasts sharply with James’ heartbreaking start in life. His 18-year-old birth mother invoked Wisconsin’s safe haven law and walked away from her newborn after bringing him into the world on July 1 at a Milwaukee hospital” (Sting 2009). The couple also has a 14-month-old foster daughter; the father is a high school English teacher and mother is a stay-at-home mom who holds a law degree. The unspoken assumption is that the baby would have had a bleak future with his urban black teenage mother. The white professional adoptive parents were lauded by the judge, who stated, “I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you opened your hearts and home to him, and a big extended family . . . God knows, we can use some good news in the child welfare arena in Milwaukee these days.” The adoptive mother, “in response to questions from the judge, promised that James would be raised in a home free from crime, substance abuse and violence.” This black baby, it is implied, will escape the crime, drugs, and violence present in Milwaukee’s black (read: low-income) neighborhoods, eliding the reality that crime, substance abuse, and violence are found in middle- and upper-class (read: white) homes. Further, the for-

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mation of this family is represented not only as legal, but also spiritual, a goal of safe haven advocates that we have previously seen featured. The journalist concludes, “James will be baptized today. He’s safe at home.” The former safe haven baby is now part of a Christian community and family; he has been rescued, body and soul, a goal that we have seen is a component of prominent safe haven advocates.

Missing Connection: Adoptive Mothers in Search of Safe Haven Moms Perhaps nowhere is the value of a safe haven baby expressed with more poignancy than on blogs and Internet discussion posts written by adoptive parents. These narratives provide more specific evidence that some adoptive parents, while attracted to receiving a healthy, newborn safe haven baby, are uncomfortable about the invisibility of the safe haven mom. Drawing on the open adoption model, some adoptive parents seek out contact with their baby’s biological mother, imagining a way to assuage what is perceived as her unending grief. These search practices reveal that adoptive parents may directly benefit from and support the outcome of safe haven laws (adoptable newborns) without privileging the value of the key component of those laws: maternal anonymity. There are not many bloggers easily identified as adoptive mothers of safe haven babies, thus it is worth looking at how one blog documents a successful safe haven family and advocates for safe haven laws. In her own words, an adoptive mother writes a Christian blog (primarily an account of her life with and treatment of scoliosis), shares details of her joy adopting a safe haven baby in Florida, and promotes the National Safe Haven Alliance (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013). Rebecca and her husband, Drew, are featured in photographs along with their adopted baby, Jude (a name they selected because it is Hebrew for “thanks and praise,” as well as in the title of a catchy Beatles song). The couple is white and the baby is black, although in no part of the blog is the transracial aspect of the adoption discussed. The blog recounts the couple’s pain over a failed adoption they experienced two months before Jude was placed with them; when they arrived at the hospital to meet their newborn, the birth mother (who had selected

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them as adoptive parents) changed her mind. In Florida, safe haven babies are put in the care of an agency selected from a state-licensed list. Rebecca explains, We did not know he was born until February 9th at 4:45 p.m. when my adoption coordinator called me and told me to come into the office the next day at 1 p.m. with a car seat. Jude had been cared for and loved by a foster family for the first three weeks of his little life. In Safe Haven adoptions, the birth parent has the ability to come back and claim their child for around 30 days. Our adoption agency waited until most of that “at risk placement” time was up before letting us know we had been matched with him. (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013)

Rebecca reflects on how the safe haven process differs from other adoption processes, and comments on the consequence of not knowing any background information about her baby, We were willing to take him though, knowing he had a few weeks left in the “at risk placement” time period, because we felt we just needed to trust God and hope that He would protect Jude and our hearts. An “at risk placement” means you are willing to take in and care for a child that may be going back to their birth parents. . . . In most adoptions in Florida, that time period is only 24 to 48 hours. So, Safe Haven babies have a longer wait, but he was well worth the worry that we might have to let him go. Because he is a Safe Haven baby, we don’t have any information about either of his birth parents, medical health history, or even his ethnic background. We always said we just wanted a baby, and we didn’t care about the details . . . well, we got what we asked for. (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013)

For Rebecca, the negatives associated with a safe haven newborn adoption, a longer at-risk period and no information about the baby’s identity, are outweighed by the positives of having their prayers answered and the newborn placed permanently in their home. This could be a color-blind, coded commentary to support the couple’s view that their black baby is just as good as any other baby they may have been able to adopt.

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Writing with the emotions of a new mother, Rebecca has compassion for Jude’s birth mother, vowing to honor her: We will never know the name of the amazing woman who gave him life, and loved him so much to make sure he was safe. I am so thankful for the Safe Haven laws that allow someone to drop off a newborn no questions asked, as the alternative is often heartbreaking . . . It does make me sad that I will not be able to tell him the name of the loving woman who took care of him so well for 9 months, and left him safely at a hospital or fire station. But I will raise him with the knowledge that she is special, and we love her for giving us the most amazing gift anyone could ever give. She gave Jude life, and she gave us our son. (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013, emphasis in original)

She attributes love and care for Jude to his biological mother, who reported at the hospital safe haven that she was 26 years old at the time of Jade’s birth, through her carrying her pregnancy to term and using a safe haven. In other blog posts, Rebecca shares her strong antiabortion and Christian perspectives, and although she does not outright thank Jude’s biological mother for continuing her pregnancy, the “taking care of him so well for 9 months” signals praise for her not having an abortion and creating a healthy baby. The expectations Rebecca has of what responsible pregnancy is are included in a blog discussion of why she and her husband decided to adopt a child. Her scoliosis surgeries and back pain were just one reason: But to be completely honest, the idea of getting pregnant, even if it’s another year from now, does not sound appealing. I have had such a difficult 4 years, with constantly being at the doctor, constantly taking pain meds, or being injected with this and that, having a million x-rays, not being able to travel or have a glass of wine, oh yeah, and having FOUR major surgeries in a row . . . well . . . let’s just say I need a BREAK. (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013, emphasis in original)

Although Rebecca’s body is not up to more physical challenges or pregnancy-related restrictions on her activities, she seems not want to miss out on the pregnancy altogether. Thinking about the nine-month

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pregnancy causes her to see a connection that preordained the direct gift from both God and Jude’s birth mother of Jude’s entrance into her life: During one of the first sleepless nights I had when Jude came home, I realized something really amazing. Since Jude was born in January, he had to have been conceived in May of last year. Last May is when Drew and I re-started the paper work to become parents through adoption. So the entire time we were going through getting home study approved, moving into our new home, picking out baby furniture, going through a heartbreaking failed adoption, and praying every night for our future baby . . . he was growing strong and healthy inside the womb of his birth mother. It took 9 months altogether, from the time we started the paper work, to the time he was born. It felt so long during the process, but now I see it took as long as it was supposed to, 9 months! (Her Scoliosis Journey Blog 2012/2013)

In this way, the adoptive mother creates a place in her baby’s life binding them even before they met. It is as though his birth mother participated in selecting Rebecca and Drew as his safe haven family, though it was a Florida adoption agency that made the choice. On Jude’s first birthday, these themes continue in a professional video a family friend created, set to Christian rock music, in which the couple dance while holding their son, show the camera scrapbook pages documenting Jude’s safe haven adoption, give thanks to Jude’s birth mother, and release yellow balloons on which the couple have written “thank you,” a gesture of gratitude both to Jade’s birth mother and to God (Farhart 2013). Jude’s birth mother remains illusive, her importance being her womb, her safe relinquishment of her newborn, and her gift to a couple desperate to raise a child. Providing insight about another adoptive family’s longing to reach out to their son’s safe haven mom and how this feeling creates an imagined life for her is seen in the perspectives of a writer on Adoption. com, Krajewskim (2007). She touches on the heartache that she believes women and girls must experience when they relinquish a baby. Krajewskim also notes that she was given some information about the safe haven baby’s mother and creates scenarios in which she is sexually innocent. Her son is identified as having particularly high adoption value because

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his birth mother is reportedly a high-honors college student, and the writer praises her for not having opted for an abortion but wonders why she did not work with an adoption agency: We are fost/adopt parents that received our county’s first Safe Haven baby and are in the process of adopting him. . . . We don’t even know her [the baby’s mother] and we are so proud of her. It must have taken all her strength and courage to do what she did. It would have been so simple to have an abortion and we are so grateful that she didn’t. All we know is that she is a high-honors college student and that birth dad is “unknown.” We know she took care of herself while she was pregnant. We guess (and it’s probably wrong, but it fits what we were told by DHHR [Department of Health and Human Resources]) that most high honors college students don’t sleep around and that she either knows who dad is and doesn’t want to tell or she really doesn’t know because she was drugged and/or drunk at a party and raped. We think she didn’t believe in abortion, but making “a plan” with an adoption agency was too painful, so she placed through safe haven. Does this even sound plausible? I would love to have an open adoption with her once we finalize, but is it violating her right to privacy because she placed through Safe Haven? I was thinking of putting an ad in the paper telling her thank you and that we love him and that we’ll tell him that she loves him and that we’ll leave our contact info at DHHR— always—if she wants to find us/him. Should we try that or should we just forget it? I imagine her sitting in a dorm room crying—her heart breaking. I know it’s no where near the same, but DH [Dear Husband] and I are infertile and I’ve miscarried a lot of babies over the years and I know how much that hurt me. I can’t imagine carrying to term and the hurt that must be there—even if you still believe the decision you made was the correct one for you and the baby at the time. I imagine her little heart must break at times for the aching want of her little angel. Sometimes, I hate adoption for that reason. I wanted to be a mom more than anything, but it’s like organ transplant, I know that for me to get my wish, someone else must go through unspeakable pain and heartache. (Krajewskim 2007)

Krajewskim attempts to identify with the safe haven mom, even though she recognizes that her experiences are so very different from

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hers. Simply stated, the pregnancy losses she experienced of wanted pregnancies are not the same as the safe haven relinquishment of a baby in the case of unwanted pregnancy. The adoptive mother, however, sees it implausible that the safe haven mother could not have wanted this baby because she herself now loves him so deeply. This judgment is revealed in Krajewskim’s impulse to reach out to the safe haven mom to create some form of open adoption contact with her son as a way to heal her presumed grief. There are two main assumptions expressed: that open adoption is best for everyone, and that the only reaction to anonymous safe haven relinquishment is grief. Krajewskim suggests that the premier feature of safe haven laws—anonymity—is unhealthy for both safe haven moms and their babies. We do not know whether women and girls who relinquish newborns at safe havens experience an outpouring of grief, but we do know that women who have abortions and those who relinquish babies in adoptions experience a range of emotions, such that no one response is shared by all. Over a span of several unsuccessful years, Krajewskim (2011) posted on Adoption.com and conducted an extensive Facebook search for her son’s West Virginia safe haven birthmom, first stating that she desired an open adoption and later wishing to fulfill her three-year-old son’s longing to know his birth mother’s name because his older brother (by adoption) had contact with his birthmom. Each of these stories demonstrates that the successful safe haven family relied on the actions of an anonymous safe haven mom to relinquish her newborn, who did not know what type of family would raise her child. The key assumption is that a better mother stepped in to do so, which reinforces the adoption philosophy underwriting safe haven laws: moving newborns up in social and economic status is framed as a benefit to society. But the anonymity component of safe haven relinquishment is met with resistance by some adoptive mothers, who state that they wish for their safe haven baby to meet her or his birth mother; Jude’s mother’s blog and video and Krajewskim’s search efforts explicitly invite this connection. These adoptive mothers, based on their own feelings of maternal love and on the norm of open adoption, question the benefit of safe haven law’s premise of maternal anonymity for the well-being of both the safe haven mom and the child. Their fear is that the safe haven mother faces unending grief, and the child faces unan-

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swerable questions about his or herself if contact is not made between them. Simultaneously, adoptive mothers who reach out for safe haven moms do not oppose the law, celebrating their joy of receiving a highly valued safe haven newborn. Indeed, a primary, underdiscussed benefit of safe haven laws to adoptive families is the availability of a healthy newborn in an adoption landscape in which such babies are rare. Although the search and contact is framed by these women as desired, adoptive mothers may underestimate how a reunion could disrupt the current role expected of safe haven moms: safely invisible, they allow others to mother their children by relinquishing their own motherhood. On a broader scale, opening the door to relationships between safe haven and adoptive mothers could reveal the stark social and economic inequalities shaping women’s motherhood options that a reproductive justice framework brings to visibility.

Will the Future Bring Searches by Teens for Their Safe Haven Moms? I have not discovered any news stories stating that now-grown safe haven infants have attempted to find their biological parents; however, I anticipate that this will become an issue in the near future. The babies first relinquished in Texas under the 1999 law are now teenagers, and they may become motivated to seek out information about their biological parents’ identities. They can easily find support from adoption rights activists who argue that the drive to know one’s biological family is a natural and normal part of adolescence, and that not doing so has negative consequences: “When you stifle curiosity about yourself, you stifle many other things as well. You shrink your area of perception. You live in a smaller place” (Lifton 2009, 53). International adoptees also participate in journeys to locate their birth mothers; travel companies sponsor group trips for adoptees called heritage tours or roots trips (Robinson 2002; Yngvesson 2002; Trenka 2005, 2009; Trenka, Oparah, and Shin 2006; Kim 2010). It is predictable that the results of searches and reunions will be mixed—some initiated by birth mothers and others by their relinquished children, and some will provide positive relationships and sense of self while others will dismantle years of fantasy that

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cannot match reality (Jones 1993; Modell 1994; Gritter 2000; Solinger 2001; Fessler 2006; Lifton 2009). We may soon see former safe haven babies featured in media stories about their search and reunification journeys. This will fill in a gap in what is visible about safe haven children’s experiences: do these children grow up with feelings different from those who were adopted through planned domestic or international adoptions, and if so, why? Of paramount importance to this book, these searches will interrupt safe haven narratives claiming that women who relinquish their newborns safely at safe haven sites have value only by carrying out that act. Reunification stories potentially offer a fuller picture of the social circumstances in a woman’s life that led her to opt for a safe haven relinquishment, how maternal love is experienced by safe haven moms, and what their perspectives are on their relinquished child’s adoptive family. The conclusion takes up how the politics of safe haven policies shifts when we move away from a narrow focus the life of a healthy newborn who is available for adoption to a more inclusive focus on the circumstances of that baby’s birth and surrender from the birth mother’s point of view.

Conclusion Safe Haven Laws and Advancing Reproductive Justice

This book has emphasized that issues surrounding baby safe haven laws are best understood as problems of reproductive justice, meaning that they call attention to the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences and the unequal social and economic support available to women and girls within our society. How is our understanding of these disparities enhanced through the voices of the few women who have spoken out to address both the challenges of decision-making about motherhood and the act of relinquishing a newborn? Paralleling our understanding that safe haven laws are not just about saving babies, women’s narratives demonstrate that “unwantedness” is not the only or the main factor that leads to safe haven relinquishment. We must consider carefully the social, legal, financial, and medical barriers rooted in racism, classism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, and citizenship inequalities that limit some girls’ and women’s opportunities to raise their children.1 From this reproductive justice position, the reason to be concerned about safe haven laws has nothing to do with whether or not they save newborns. Baby-saving, it goes without saying, is important. But what must be brought to light and contested are the broader effects of these laws and the discourses used to promote them. Safe haven advocacy campaigns conceal and advance antiabortion politics, stereotype marginalized women as bad mothers, encourage newborn adoption up the economic social hierarchy outside of established adoption norms, and transfer visibility away from other interventions that can support women and girls who are faced with a lack of resources during pregnancy and childbirth. A reproductive justice reframing recognizes that safe haven laws and advocacy organizations do offer some real benefits to some women, but also argues that we need urgently to expand these 203

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benefits through other means and to clarify the broader cultural work that safe haven laws are doing.

Safe Haven Moms’ Identities: Silence and Speaking Out In reading hundreds of stories featuring the voices of safe haven advocates, first responders, journalists, and people who have adopted safe haven newborns, it has been glaringly apparent that the direct voice of the so-called safe haven mom is missing. The exceptions are statements from those who relinquished older children in 2008, when Nebraska’s law did not restrict safe haven surrenders to infants; however, there were no public statements during that media-saturated time by anyone who relinquished a newborn. The safe haven newborn’s mother and the reasons behind her relinquishment decision remain largely invisible, severely limiting social recognition of the factors motivating the use of safe haven. As I have argued throughout the book, the common media and safe haven law advocacy depiction of a girl or woman who surrenders a baby at a safe haven site is that she is compliant or silent as she relinquishes both her newborn and her identity as the mother of that baby. This sacrifice is lived with secrecy, perceived to indicate true maternal love, and provides the baby with a high adoption value as both healthy and unencumbered by family ties. The safe haven mom is represented as expressing no needs of her own. In San Diego, for example, a woman “dressed in pajamas” who “appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s” went to a fire station, handing over to the emergency medical technician who answered the door the healthy 10-pound, two-hours-old newborn she had delivered alone at home (Baker 2010). No one should overlook the impressive display of strength demonstrated by this woman giving birth to a 10-pound baby without support, followed by her appearance at a fire station within two hours. A spokesperson reported that “she was holding the baby and looking at the safe haven law sign on the station wall when the EMT opened the door,” and she said, “I can’t take care of him”; the woman was “shy and soft-spoken” and declined an offer to take her to a hospital (Baker 2010). This case shows that although safe haven laws do not include attention to women’s needs, some emergency first responders may do so. However, because such care is outside of the

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law’s mandate, first responders may not offer assistance and women may feel it is too risky to accept it. Even if this woman needed postpartum medical care, she may have worried about her responsibility to pay for these services and the risk of losing her anonymity. The representation of this woman as a good mother who wanted to relinquish her newborn detracts from questions about whether she might have opted to raise her baby if the statement “I can’t take care of him” was addressed in full— for instance, through counseling or connections to social services and financial assistance. This case is one of many that provides insight into how safe haven laws fail to adequately attend to a relinquishing mother’s perspectives or needs with a depth of care about her own life. To borrow some of the terms safe haven advocates use, the reporting of relinquishing mothers’ silence and compliance, seen also in the stories presented earlier in this book, keeps secrets and conceals the reasons women and girls have for feeling unable or unwilling to mother a newborn or go through a planned adoption process. The generalized assumption that relinquishing mothers grieve their loss preserves social norms about how mothers are expected to feel about newborns. A story reporting on pros and cons of the increased availability of baby boxes in Europe concludes, “the one voice never heard is that of the mother who walks the path with the baby she bore secretly hours earlier, to return without the bundle. Her tears can barely be imagined” (Evans 2012). This vision is too simplistic; there is also the possibility that there may be no tears due to shock, pain, numbness, relief, pride, or a combination of emotions. It is a real challenge to find women speaking out or writing publicly about their experience about having surrendered a newborn at a safe haven site. There are some women’s narratives circulating within safe haven advocacy circles, which are mediated by advocates. Safe haven advocates talk to women who call their hotlines, and advocates may document the circumstances in which these women seek pregnancy support and safe haven information. One reported example is the case of a woman who surrendered a baby at a Florida fire station in 2003. Upon learning about the relinquishment a journalist contacted Florida safe haven advocate Nick Silverio, who “said a woman who he believes is the mother of the unidentified baby girl called his help line an hour before dropping her off. ‘She said she had the baby and didn’t want to keep

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it. . . . She said she thought it through’” (Sampson and Celeste 2003). Silverio’s comments support both the argument that his organization is helpful by directing women to use safe havens, and that some women carefully choose to relinquish their newborns at safe haven sites. Not reported are the reasons why this woman felt that this was her best option or whether the motherhood obstacles she faced could be overcome. When and how do we hear from women and girls more directly about their life circumstances and decision-making about motherhood? One place is on safe haven advocacy websites. For example, grateful words of thanks posted by a safe haven mom on the Florida A Safe Haven for Newborn website’s “Testimonials” section praise safe havens and their advocates (A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.c). The tone and language of this post by “B” has a scripted ring to it, perhaps because it addresses many aspects of safe haven organizations’ activities that are not provided for in safe haven laws, including medical care, financial support, and types of adoption. This testimonial’s language suggests that it could have been written by a member of the safe haven group or by a woman who experienced these events and absorbed advocacy language to express her experience (see Scott 1991): When I found out I was pregnant I didn’t know what to do. I thought that if I just didn’t think about it and acted like it wasn’t happening, the situation I was in would resolve itself. I kept my entire pregnancy hidden from my family and friends and isolated myself for three months. All I had was the support of two very close friends . . . until I called Safe Haven. When I called I knew that my due date was days away. I was so distressed and so alone and hadn’t put a lot of thought into what I was going to do when it actually came time to deliver the baby. The call to Safe Haven was the best decision I ever made. I wasn’t judged, and I was treated with respect and kindness throughout the whole process. I received medical care the day after I made the call, and the day I went in I ended up giving birth to a beautiful, healthy baby girl. I received calls every single day I was in the hospital, and was provided with a direct number should I have any questions about the financial side of the delivery or any other part of it. My baby is now going to be raised in a kind, loving family that I was able to choose, and I will receive pictures and letters so that I can watch her grow. Absolutely none of this would have been possible without Nick

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[Silverio] and Safe Haven. I’m so grateful for everything and I thank God every day that I was able to give a gift to two people who truly deserve it, and that Safe Haven was there for me every step of the way. (A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.c)

We see a blurring of the boundaries between a safe haven organization engaged in saving newborns from abandonment by urging women to use legal, anonymous relinquishment and the group’s facilitation of a hospital birth and adoption. Safe haven laws are not premised on providing hospital care or open adoption arrangements, and critics of safe haven laws report that Florida and others states have erroneously reported experiences like B’s as a safe haven surrender instead of an adoption relinquishment (see Appell 2002c; BabyLoveChild 2009). Counseling, hospital care for labor and delivery, financial assistance, and a connection to an open adoption agency were facilitated by the Florida safe haven organization;2 these services overlap with what is offered by antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers, as we have seen. More importantly, this range of services is not part of safe haven advocates’ public messages about how to relinquish one’s newborn with legal anonymity, nor are they stipulated in safe haven laws. B’s experience with safe haven advocates’ support is not the same one we have seen in outreach campaigns featuring the silent woman or girl who hands her baby over at a safe haven site and walks away. I recognize that in B’s case, the boundary crossing between infant abandonment prevention and adoption services did provide her with individual benefits and immediate care. Bundling these services within a safe haven organization framework featuring successful baby saving, however, suggests that it is operating as an adoption agency and detracts attention from the circumstances of the woman’s life and her hidden pregnancy. A reproductive justice framework compels us to ask whether safe haven adoption was seen by this woman as the only option, and if so what social, economic, familial, and community factors meant that she hid her pregnancy and considered just days before delivery the possibility of relinquishing her newborn. Providing some information about why they safely surrendered newborn and their feelings about doing so, women’s direct expressions about relinquishment are also found in notes left with infants. Ten years after

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the first safe haven law was passed in Texas, an infant was left outside of a medical office near a Corpus Christi children’s hospital along with a handwritten note poignantly conveying both the baby’s perspective and his mother’s: “Born Oct. 4, 2009, at 2:30 a.m. Please help me. My mother cannot care for me and is very sorry to leave me here. I have nothing for him. Please help” (McFarland 2009). The note expresses sorrow and communicates well that the newborn and his mother were in need of assistance. In fact, in this case, child protective services officials announced that if the mother wanted to reunite with the child, support could be provided (McFarland 2009). This outcome is in keeping with reproductive justice imperatives for our society to support mothers. It suggests powerfully that if the reasons behind safe haven relinquishments are known, those women and girls who wish to raise their newborn but feel they cannot—seemingly for financial reasons in this case—could be connected to services that would assist them to mother their infant. This case also exposes that safe haven relinquishment is a stark symbol of unequal access to parenting support and that safe haven laws and the issues surrounding them highlight pervasive inequalities in our society. With greater depth, a 2002 Florida near-miss safe haven court case reveals that financial strain, a lack of family support, and undocumented immigrant status can push a woman to relinquish her infant against her heartfelt wishes. Icilma Williams, age 35, was an unemployed black Caribbean woman originally from St. Kitts and Nevis who lived in the United States for 15 years with an expired tourist visa. She dropped off her seven-and-a-half-week-old infant daughter in her baby carrier with a full baby bottle, near a fire station. A note left with the baby stated, with a formal tone, “‘To whom it may concern, this is one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make in my life—giving up my baby. You see due to certain circumstances beyond my control, I cannot take care of her as I should’” (McNeal 2002a). A court case followed, because this near-miss safe haven case did not fit closely enough with the law—the baby was both found outside of the fire station and was older than the three-day age limit. Williams explained, “the day-to-day basic needs, I couldn’t pick them up” and “I didn’t leave her in front of the garage because I didn’t want the big firetrucks to run over her” (quoted in McNeal 2002a). The media reported that “she cried on the way to the Carol City

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neighborhood in Miami-Dade, where she lived with a friend” (quoted in McNeal 2002a); this low-income neighborhood is predominantly black and Hispanic. The single woman had no other children and did not know she was pregnant until she gave birth at Miami-Dade’s Parkway Regional Medical Center. At that time, she did not opt for adoption or safe haven relinquishment, indicating that she wished to raise her daughter. The note that Williams left with the infant describes both caring for her baby and feeling unable to do so. It stated, “I couldn’t bear to see her starving, sometimes when I couldn’t afford to buy her milk” (quoted in McNeal 2002a). The result was court-ordered parenting and anger management classes as well as a required job search. Williams was reunited with her daughter two months after the fire station drop-off, setting her on a path toward regaining legal custody (McNeal 2002b, 2002c, 2002d). This case reveals that once the challenges that a mother faces are known, it may be possible that solutions can be found and services provided to support her to raise her baby. The message that greater official attention to the lack of social, medical, mental health, and economic support is desperately needed was indeed the primary one during Nebraska’s 2008 crisis when a number of distressed teenagers were relinquished at safe haven sites. Media accounts focused on the severe hardships that led to safe haven relinquishment. Searching beyond news media sources, I have found only a scant number of safe haven mom voices, likely due to a combination of there being few safe haven users overall and social stigma around surrendering motherhood through a safe haven relinquishment. A dizzying array of motherhood blogs, Internet forums, and online advice groups offers a direct way for women and girls to write directly about their experiences.3 Mothers weigh in on an enormous range of issues in the online context in which names and identities need not be disclosed. This could be an attractive forum for women who have used safe havens to relinquish a child. There is a small discussion thread on the mega-sized Adoption.com in a Safe Haven–Baby Moses Support Forum. Notably, there are no more than 15 replies to the posts, but between 600 and 3,500 views for some, suggesting that this is an eye-catching topic and yet too stigmatized to elicit participation by many. The participation guidelines suggest that baby safe haven policies are emotive and politically sensitive:

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The purpose of this forum is to provide a place of support for mothers who have elected to place their child using their states Safe Haven/Baby Moses laws. This is a support forum only, not a venue for debate over the morality and ethicalness of the laws in place in many states. The sole purpose of this forum is to provide mothers a place to come to find support from other people who have been through a similar experience. (Adoption.com Forums 2007)

Achieving this goal is not so easy, however, in the experience of Thanksgivingmom, who started a forum discussion in 2007 called “Ask a Safe Haven Birthmom!” (2007). The post is on an adoption-focused website, so is not surprising that the adoption discourse of “birthmom” is used. The woman who starts the forum encourages safe haven birthmoms to end their silence, noting how hard it is to connect with anyone who shares this experience and stating, “I believe that Safe Haven birthmothers are a particularly silenced group” because of the stigma, judgment, and “horror story competitions” that might come along with discussing safe haven decisions. This suggests that compassion about birth mothers’ situations is not widespread. I wrote this for my blog, but figured I could try it out here too. I stare at this blank screen thinking about Safe Haven and what I want to write about. I realized recently that a lot of people know about Safe Haven in theory, but not necessarily in practice. I lived Safe Haven, and while I have been looking to connect with other women that have used Safe Haven, or similar laws, I haven’t come up with much. Maybe it’s because women that use Safe Haven aren’t sitting in front of computers all day. Maybe it’s because women that use Safe Haven are trying to live the old school Don’t think about it and you’ll get over it—which we know isn’t true. And maybe it’s because women that use Safe Haven feel a unique kind of shame that keeps them quiet. Most of us hid our entire pregnancy, so why wouldn’t we continue to hide now? While I don’t want birthmother horror stories to become a competition, because many of us have our fair share, and it doesn’t get us anywhere, I believe that Safe Haven birthmothers are a particularly silenced group. Clearly, I am not terribly silenced. At least not in Cyber space.

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And I do NOT profess to have the ability to speak for all Safe Haven birthmothers, just this one! But as I was looking into information about Safe Haven, both before AND after placement, I found very little information other than what the basic law was for any given state. So, I offer you, ask a Safe Haven birthmom! (Thanksgivingmom 2007)

Thanksgivingmom ultimately failed to inspire women to break the silence about their relinquishing experience, and she offers her own experience as unique, not typical of all safe haven moms. On this forum thread, there are several inquires about how to put your name on a list to foster and adopt a safe haven baby, posts with more questions to Thanksgivingmom, and posts from a woman who adopted a safe haven baby. None of the forum participants identify themselves as safe haven moms. Loveajax replied first, with sensitivity, and also with many questions to Thanksgivingmom about why she did not pursue a planned adoption: Actually, a question I have is, knowing NOW what you know and having experienced what you have experienced (isn’t hindsight great!), would you have preferred to have worked with an agency/professional or somehow “selected” your DD’s a parents [dear daughter’s adoptive parents]? Did you ever think to do that during your pg [pregnancy]? Did anyone know that you were pg [pregnant]? (I know your family did not). Thanks. I think you are totally brave and thoughtful and kind (I know you don’t want to hear the brave part, but I really think about what you went thru and feel that way). (Loveajax 2007)

Full answers were not provided for these questions, but we learn that Thanksgivingmom’s experience is certainly not a routine or highly publicized type of safe haven relinquishment outcome. She was working on a master’s degree when she was pregnant, and after the safe haven surrender of her baby, the adoptive mother suggested an open adoption arrangement. It is unclear how Thanksgivingmom and the adoptive mother were connected—perhaps through a private agency contracted by the state or via a safe haven organization. Thanksgivingmom is relieved by the open adoption arrangement, and shares that she benefits because she enjoys hearing about her daughter growing up. It could be

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the case that safe haven moms who do not share Thanksgivingmom’s positive experiences with safe haven use are less apt to discuss their feelings on this forum. Indeed, on a different website, representing a view that opposes praise of safe haven laws and written in her own direct voice, a woman shared her experience as a nonconsenting safe haven mom. Melissa posted to the adoptee rights advocacy blog BabyLoveChild in 2009 in response to blogger Marley Greiner’s attention to the ineffectiveness of the laws. Melissa states that as a 16-year-old she hid her pregnancy, experienced the difficult breech birth of her son at home, and called an adoption agency that directed her to a hospital’s safe haven site. At the hospital, Melissa reports, she was coerced while medicated with Demerol (a narcotic painkiller) to consent to surrendering her newborn without her full understanding of the law’s consequences. According to the Michigan link on the National Safe Haven Alliance website, the state safe haven law, called the Safe Delivery Law, was established in 2001 and approves the relinquishment of a newborn up to three days old and stipulates a 28day window for a parent to petition the court to regain custody (n.d.c). Melissa, with the support of her parents, fought a custody battle against the adoption agency that received her newborn through a subcontract with the state. Melissa tells her story on the BabyLoveChild blog this way (and to preserve her immediate self-expression, I have edited the post only for punctuation and spelling for clarity of reading): I live in Michigan and in 2001 I gave my son up under the safe delivery law. I was 16 and had delivered him at home. I was terrified and called an adoption agency out fear she directed me to the hospital and told me to tell the emergency room staff safe delivery I had no idea what that meant or what was about to happen the social worker said she would meet me there . . . This law is full of holes. I have custody of my son now and he’s 8 years old healthy smart and perfect but the battle of getting my newborn back was horrible the state had no provisions for what would happen if I changed my mind the adoption agency fought me so hard they even lied in court they tried everything to keep my baby they took advantage of me and the law it makes me sick to know that the same people who abused the law to begin with are now the ones running the training program. What an industry. (BabyLoveChild 2009)

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In Melissa’s experience, and emphasizing the unsurpassed value of the safe haven baby we have seen in this book, the Michigan adoption agency that received her healthy safe haven newborn prized him to the extent that it fought against her attempt to regain custody. The cost of the custody battle is clarified in a second blog post Melissa wrote: “I also forgot to mention that I changed my mind the next day and made the adoption agency and the hospital aware of my decision right away but it took 5 weeks and cost my parents about 20,000 dollars to regain custody of my baby.” We do not have insight into why Melissa felt she needed to hide her pregnancy from her parents, who certainly later stepped up to support Melissa and her son and found the financial means to do so. This signals a warning to those who stereotype all teenagers as resource-less; some pregnant women and girls who are afraid to admit that they are pregnant might be surprised to find that they would receive family support. Melissa’s experience indicates the need for high-quality community-based programs for teenagers to facilitate communication between them and their parents or other responsible adults to enhance sex and pregnancy decision-making support (see Fields 2008; New York State Department of Health 2010; Romo, Nadeem, and Koumoudjian 2010; Elliott 2012; Garcia 2012). Melissa addresses her feelings about being in safe haven laws’ targeted teenager group. As a 16-year-old who had given birth at home she fit the profile that advocates publicize, but also she argues that she never entertained dumping her newborn. Further, Melissa observed that other safe haven moms, whom she characterizes as over 40 years old and having delivered their babies in hospitals, did not fit the stereotype of the desperate teen. Melissa’s observation about hospital births being tallied as safe haven relinquishments corroborates Greiner’s blog report and evidence from media stories on baby safe haven cases in Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, and Kentucky—as well as Florida, in B’s case above—that women give birth in hospitals then surrender their newborns citing the safe haven law instead of pursuing a planned adoption. Hospital birth scenarios were not presented in state legislative debates or in safe haven advocacy materials. Melissa contends, I’ve read the statistics for Michigan and your article right on I’m one of the very few there that wasn’t a 40-year-old women who gave birth in a

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hospital. I never had any intentions on throwing my baby in a trash can nor did I want to abandon my baby under such a law but was in shock from delivering a butt breech baby and was terrified because I hid my pregnancy. (BabyLoveChild 2009)

Continuing her story, Melissa discusses the strong pressure she received to decide not to mother her son: “The adoption agency I dealt with was evil and self serving and repeatedly tried to talk me out of filing for custody telling how I would regret my child and it would ruin my life which none of that is true my son is the best part of my life he’s an amazing little boy.” The problems Melissa faced were her unsupported breech birth (in which the newborn is not positioned head-first), as well as her inability to understand that she was consenting to a safe haven surrender while in postpartum shock and terrified to seek care because she had concealed her pregnancy. The problems that followed her safe haven relinquishment were also pain-filled and very expensive. Marley Greiner, the blogger who also wrote the “Baby Dump News,” posted a response to Melissa’s story asking for more details. Greiner echoes my observation that “we very seldom hear first-person accounts from women who have used the law,” and she thanks Melissa for sharing her experience (BabyLoveChild 2009). Melissa’s reply explains the difficulties of the court case. That the adoption agency attempted to sue Melissa’s family for legal fees upon her successful case to regain custody of her son reemphasizes the business aspect of adoption, which Melissa felt was privileged over caring about her as a mother. She concludes by stating she has wanted to speak out about her negative safe haven experience: “This topic is very near to my heart and I swore when my son came home that I was gonna do something about it but I’m still trying to find a platform to do it from. Thanks so much!” Melissa’s inability to identify where to expose her negative experiences eight years after her son’s birth reveals, just as Thanksgivingmom found, that there is no community of safe haven moms or public recognition of negative safe haven experiences. The resulting pervasive silence about the experiences women and girls have with safe haven surrender detracts both from safe haven moms receiving support from each other and from society’s understanding of the complexities of that experience,

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including, as in Melissa’s case, the traumatic negative accounts that some women and girls have. This harrowing narrative focuses on her lack of consent to safe haven relinquishment and on the adoption professionals’ assumption that her son was better off with adoptive parents. Her experience goes against the assumption that all so-called safe haven moms actively choose to make use of the safe haven law and also supports the underlying logic of adoption: the movement of infants up the socioeconomic ladder is good for the infants and for society. Social, economic, and other disparities lead to judgments favoring some girls and women as deserving to be mothers, and disadvantage others as potential bad mothers by framing them as doing the only reasonable thing to be good mothers by relinquishing motherhood. A woman who relinquished her newborn after being advised by others that this was her only socially acceptable option communicates well how women’s reproductive decisions are made within the context of constraining definitions of who is a good mother. Rox (2011) wrote a sharp analysis of painful experiences surrounding her distressed decision to surrender her daughter in a blog post that addressed adoption as a feminist issue (Brigid 2011). Unlike most safe haven moms, Rox had a planned, open adoption; however, her criticism also applies to safe haven discourses about responsible motherhood decision-making. The uniform advice that professionals offered her was to “do what is best” for the baby, and the list of reasons why she should not be a mother touches on age, mental health, relationship status, and socioeconomic status, which includes a need for government services: In my particular story I was given the impression by professionals and EVEN FEMINIST women I knew (my midwife) that adoption was the morally correct thing to do and would be better for the child. The reasons: I was too young. I had ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]. I had experienced an abusive relationship which was clearly a sign that I was as bad as the abuser. I was making 10.50 an hour. I was single.

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I lived in an apartment. Using government services would be a burden on society. Well what’s interesting is that after being completely barraged with messages about how unworthy I was; it turned out the adoptive mother was on the verge of a divorce and knew this and didn’t tell me. She got divorced when my daughter was two. The adoptive father behaved violently. She was then a single mother who made 12 dollars an hour and used WIC, foodstamps and government insurance. They lived in an apartment. She was a smoker. She liked to go out and get drunk quite frequently. She took my daughter to spend the night in the house of a man she had never met before who she had been talking to on the internet. He stole her car. You know what? Dammit she doesn’t deserve to be judged any more than I did. The point is that I never should have been made to feel I was unworthy, that seeking help would make me bad, that I was inherently bad for having been in an abusive relationship, that you can’t be a good parent even if you are nonneurotypical. The professionals involved in offering me support were not offering me support. They offered nothing but the government aid forms and then a request that I think about what’s best. (Rox 2011)

Rox’s analysis highlights how social service and medical professionals assumed that she would be a bad mother and her baby would be better off in an adoptive home, which Rox at some level may have agreed with and reflects her lack of social, familial, and economic support. She did relinquish her newborn daughter. But her knowledge of problems within her daughter’s adoptive family calls into question the commonplace idea that adoption is a win-win situation (see Joyce 2013). The reality in this case is that Rox, her daughter, and her daughter’s adoptive mother all suffered. In cases of safe haven surrender discussed in this book as well as in other types of adoption relinquishments, a reproductive justice framework argues for actions to reduce the challenges that women face so that they can be supported to pursue, not relinquish, motherhood. Rox’s concise suggestions recognize that as a society we can support marginalized pregnant women with greater respect and stronger resources: The premise of unplanned pregnancy counseling when considering adoption should NOT be:

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Do you have enough to parent well? Consider how much the adoptive parents have. Can you offer as much? What will better for the child? The question professionals use should be: What are the obstacles that are in the way of you being the mother you want to be? We are experienced in working with issues that make parenting hard for women, let us help you work through those issues so that you can successfully parent; and if we can’t address the big issues that put your child at risk, adoption will always be on the table. Professionals should be connecting women to domestic violence services, should be giving out pamphlets about how to identify abuse in a relationship and where to go for help; should be addressing women’s self esteem issues about parenting in an empowering rather than disempowering way; should be seeking to identify needed resources and connecting women in need with community resources; should be working with a woman to help her believe in herself and be the woman she wants to be for her child rather than trying to break her down and convince her to sacrifice herself for her child. Meanwhile the adoptive parents are paying [$]20,000 and up for a newborn? Why does that money not generate services to help women successfully parent through research based initiatives to meet the obstacles they face? (Rox 2011)

These ideas about how to restructure resources and reframe the messages available to pregnant women advocate for social change toward the reproductive justice movement’s goal to create a society in which women are not stigmatized as bad mothers due to racism, classism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized disparities. We must recognize the social and economic contexts within which sexuality education and sexual activity take place, resulting in celebration for some and distress for other girls and women. Based on their individual life circumstances, family expectations, and community resources, some pregnant women will opt for abortion, some will opt to relinquish infants, and some will opt to raise their children. In line with the core platform of the reproductive justice movement, to ensure “the right to have an abortion, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children” (Price 2010, 43), support should be provided for all of these decisions to meet women’s diverse needs.

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At the same time, in her ethnography on child welfare policies, Jennifer Reich cautions us to remember that “in some cases, parents cannot adequately care for their children, no matter how many services they receive . . . It is important to recognize that in some situations, children are better off without their biological parents” (2005, 272; see also Connolly 2000). In other words, adoption—including safe haven relinquishment as an adoption practice—should not be a goal for social service professionals, but should represent one of many resources that can be relied on. Safe haven laws and the promotion of safe haven relinquishment as a silent, socially acceptable act has directed us away from seeing the complexities of women’s pregnancy decision-making, concealing reproductive injustices in our society.

Shifting Views on What Safe Haven Laws Support In our consumer driven society, a commonly promoted idea is that individual choice is what defines rational, independent actors. Given this context, it can be all too easy to view safe haven laws as beneficial because they offer pregnant women an additional good choice. Legislators who supported safe haven laws framed the law as a needed option that desperate women may choose safe haven relinquishment instead of abortion or abandonment. Embedded in this assumption is the idea that women are empowered when they are offered options. Cautioning us against this dominant view, reproductive justice scholars expose that inequalities are hidden within the discourse of choice. For example, feminist political scientist and international reproductive justice advocate Rosalind Petchesky offers a concise statement about abortion choice, which applies equally to the options of adoption, abandonment, safe haven use, or parenting: “We have to focus less on ‘choice’ and more on how to transform the social conditions of choosing, working, and reproducing” (Petchesky 1990, 11; see also Rothman 1989, 2005; Solinger 2001; Morgan and Roberts 2012). Her position on the constraints of choice discourses helps us to understand that safe haven laws are not benign baby-saving projects precisely because they are entrenched in reproductive politics that go beyond individual choice. As reproductive justice scholar Jael Silliman points out, “this emphasis on individual choice . . . obscures the social context in which individuals

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make choices, and discounts the ways in which the state regulates populations, disciplines individual bodies, and exercises control over sexuality, gender, and reproduction” (2002, xi). When we recognize fully how the women and girls who relinquish newborns do so in the context of a lack of social support and severely limited state social services, as demonstrated in the experiences of Iclima Williams, Thanksgivingmom, B., Melissa, Rox, and others, we understand with greater clarity that safe haven laws work to guide marginalized women and girls away from motherhood. In turn, their newborns are placed with adoptive families who have higher social and economic status, keeping in place social inequalities and perpetuating in our society the reality that motherhood is a class privilege (Solinger 2001; Rothman 2005; Flavin 2009 Gailey 2010; Briggs 2012; Joyce 2013). The promotion of safe haven laws emphasizes to resource-challenged women that the best motherhood choice is the relinquishment of it. Thus, the central work that these laws do is to save newborns from their mothers. Missing from safe haven advocacy campaigns is an attempt to address the power disparities involved in women’s and girls’ consent to sex and pregnancy; their access to nonjudgmental sexuality and reproductive health services, including contraception, abortion, and adoption; social support and medical care during pregnancy and childbirth; and parenting resources. As we have seen, abstinence-only sex education and stigma around teen pregnancy itself may contribute to girls concealing their pregnancies and feeling that their only recourse is to use safe haven laws. Clearly, the work that safe haven advocates do is interconnected with a broad range of social-political issues. When thinking about the context of a woman’s opting to relinquish her newborn at a safe haven site, we must consider the consequences both for individual women themselves and for discourses surrounding motherhood and safe haven laws. From a reproductive justice standpoint, the central feature of safe haven laws that may appeal to women and girls is the anonymity that a safe haven relinquishment offers. However, it is this legal component, and attendant social stigma around the use of safe haven surrender, that leaves us without access to women’s narratives about their relinquishment experiences and their feelings about it. The invisibility of women who relinquish newborns safe haven sites has several effects: 1) it

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leaves unchallenged an assumption that the act imbues a newborn with maternal love and a better future than the biological mother could offer; 2) it evades a dialogue about sexual and pregnancy decision-making, directing attention away from discussions about the power, or lack thereof, that girls and women feel that they have over their sexual and reproductive experiences; and 3) it keeps from public view the reasons that those who lack resources—particularly low-income women, young women, women of color, and immigrant women—struggle with pregnancy and parenting, eliminating an opportunity to address the obstacles that they face. Greater access to women’s first-person accounts can encourage a broader understanding of the reproductive injustices that result in some women opting for safe haven relinquishment. All states passed safe haven laws well over a decade ago, and currently it seems politically and practically difficult to discontinue them. In this politically challenging time, filled with legislative attacks on access to abortion and contraception, it is difficult to envision the successful motivation of public and legislative support to strengthen access to nonjudgmental resources on sexuality, pregnancy, and parenting. Despite this restrictive context, reproductive justice advocates can emphasize within and beyond safe haven laws the need for greater support women and girls’ sexual and reproductive health education and services. We could work to redesign safe haven site protocols to enhance postpartum services, mental health care, and connections to social-economic resources for girls and women who relinquish newborns at safe haven locations. Even if one agrees that, for example—relying on the stereotype promoted by safe haven advocates—a single, low-income teen who gave birth at home without anyone knowing she was pregnant is not wellprepared for motherhood, it is not socially, emotionally, or medically ethical to guide her to a safe haven option that focuses on her newborn without any care for her specific needs. Safe haven laws should not trade a woman or girl’s expression of her reality for legal anonymity, assign her a positive social value only upon relinquishment of a healthy newborn, fail to ensure that she has mental health and postpartum care, and leave her with a stigmatized, secret identity. There is no justice in the circumstances of these events. Safe haven advocates’ stereotyping of some women and girls as irresponsible reproducers and suggestion that safe haven relinquishment is

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the right choice for them signals our failure as a society to take responsibility for addressing the social and economic inequalities that make motherhood feel like an insurmountable challenge for some women and teenagers. Mobilizing a reproductive justice framework, we must recognize that safe haven advocacy organizations, which share characteristics with antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers, offer immediate resources for distressed women and girls—which may include hotline counseling, housing, hospital stays, and adoption facilitation—and also point out that they do so without attending to the broader social and economic inequalities that create gaps in pregnancy and parenting support for pregnant women. Feminist historian Rickie Solinger observes that “it has been very rare in this country to think about relinquishment as a coerced act, forced on a mother who wanted to keep her child” (2001, 74). This book’s analysis of the issues surrounding safe haven laws and their promotion reveals that the stated intent of these measures, saving babies, conceals the social injustices that coerce some women and girls to relinquish their newborns. Addressing newborn abandonment by implementing safe haven laws signals the abandonment by society of support for all mothers. We need to look no further than the fact that economic, mental health, or medical care for so-called safe haven moms—some of whom have delivered their newborns with no support—is not a feature of safe haven laws, and relinquishing mothers’ voices are absent from public safe haven discourses. With other reproductive justice advocates, this book supports a call to shift public policies and social attitudes away from narrow judgments about who should become mothers and who should relinquish motherhood as an act of maternal love. We must focus instead on working to reduce social inequalities and insist on stronger support for all girls and women who are faced with challenging life circumstances and difficult reproductive decisions.

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Notes

Introduction

1 For readability, I use quotation marks only the first time I use terms that are emphasized throughout the book as socially or politically contested. 2 Race and class affect mothers and children in ways that are far from the safe haven framing of saving babies. Lane’s (2008) research in Syracuse, New York, found that in the late 1980s black babies died at more than twice the rate of white babies, pointing to structural inequalities and differential health care (see also Bridges 2011; Gálvez 2011). 3 See Rothman 1989, 1993, 2005; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Bassin, Honey, and Kaplan 1994; Nakano Glenn, Chang, and Rennie Forcey 1994; Fineman and Karpin 1995; Korbin 1998; Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998; Hanigsberg and Ruddick 1999; Rapp 1999; Ragoné and Twine 2000; Meyer and Oberman 2001; Layne 2002; Wozniak 2002; Paxson 2004; Oberman 2006; Markens 2007; Flavin 2009; Landsman 2008; Oberman and Meyer 2008; Marre and Briggs 2009; O’Reilly 2010a, 2010b; Teman 2010; Briggs 2012. 4 See Roberts 1999; Ross et al. 2001; Solinger 2001; Silliman and Bhattacharjee 2002; Nelson 2003; Silliman et al. 2004; Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice 2005; Smith 2005; Ehrenreich 2008; Flavin 2009; Luna 2009, 2010, 2011; Price 2010, 2011; Chrisler 2012; Solinger et al. 2012; Luna and Luker 2013; SisterSong 2013; Thomsen 2013. 5 See Nathanson 1991; Hill Collins 1994; Perales 1995; Harris 1996; Hays 1996, 2004; Kaplan and Hochschild 1997; Luker 1997; Roberts 1999; Connolly 2000; Mullings and Wali 2001; Solinger 2001; Wozniak 2002; Nelson 2003; Silliman et al. 2004; McCormack 2005; Tapia 2005, 2011; Chavez 2004, 2008; Gutiérrez 2008; López 2008; Kluchin 2009; Reagan 2010; Bridges 2011; Edin and Kefalas 2011; Gálvez 2011; Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio, 2011; Garcia 2012; Kafer 2013. Research on the marketing of eggs and sperm points to the “paradoxical finding, that women of color are often compensated at higher levels for their reproductive material than are white women” given the difficulty attracting diverse donors (Almeling 2011, 173). 6 Even in the late 2000s, prisoners felt pressured to consent to sterilization after childbirth in two California prisons (Johnson 2013). 7 Some mainstream pro-choice groups and scholars use the term “reproductive justice,” raising concerns about misrepresentation of the reproductive justice movement. Presenting the goal as the right to abortion for all women is not fully accurate; reproductive justice activists fight for the right to abortion and the right to motherhood (see Generations Ahead 2009, 2010; Price 2010, 61–62; Luna 2011, 239; Luna and Luker 2013). 

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8 This report uses “discarded” infants to mean those left in public places, and “abandoned” to refer to babies and children, also called “boarder babies,” who are medically cleared for discharge but remain in the hospital due to lack of a suitable placement. 9 Feminist Jennifer Baumgartner’s film and campaign “I had an abortion” places women’s abortion stories in public view (http://abortionandlife.com/), and artist Heather Ault designed colorful banners for display at abortion clinics and political actions reading, “Good women have abortions” (Ludlow 2012, 479). Emphasizing that abortion is not the only stigmatized reproductive practice, Zoll (2013) documents public silence by those who use reproductive technologies. 10 I selected these sources following Best’s analysis of missing children discourses in the 1980s (1990, 13–16). 11 There is some evidence of earlier attention to legislation to prevent abandoned babies. Legal scholar Gee (2001, 154), cites an Alabama 1975 Safe Haven statute, however, I have found no evidence confirming this claim. In 1981, then-Syracuse City Councilor Nancy Larraine Hoffmann established the Maternity Crisis Task Force in response to three abandoned babies in the local area (Rochester Area Right to Life 2001). As a Republican State Senator, she sponsored New York’s safe haven legislation in 2001 (Duggan 2001). 12 Demonstrating how personal and political networks overlap, the husband of the Minnesota organization’s leader was the president Clear Channel Television, which owns the Alabama station where Jodi Brooks worked (Smith 2000). The local safe haven model reportedly was applied in Pensacola, Florida and Pascagoula, Mississippi (Marcotty 2000). 13 Preceding safe haven laws, a national media frenzy was stirred by two cases in which young women’s secretive pregnancies led to their newborns’ deaths (Meyer and Oberman 2001, 19; Barnett 2006). In fall 1996, Amy Grossberg and her boyfriend Brian Peterson, both college students, wrapped the newborn’s body and put it in a dumpster at the Delaware hotel where Grossberg gave birth. In New Jersey, Melissa Drexler went to the restroom during her spring 1997 high school prom, gave birth in a stall, and returned to the dance floor (see Barnett 2006). 14 The enactment of child abuse laws as the best way to protect children positioned state agencies as policing families rather than working to eliminate the roots of family violence (see Reich 2005). 15 The proposed 2001 Safe Havens Support Act sought TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) funding for safe haven awareness programs (WilliamsMbengue 2001). 16 This argument’s power may wane. Resources creating direct-to-consumer access to genetic analysis, such as 23andMe.com, make it possible for adoptees to gain information about their family background; the US Food and Drug Administration currently restricts medical history claims (Hiltzik 2013). 17 This argument appeared in a letter by a Philadelphia woman to the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “Those in the adoption industry who fear the movement

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for open records have put forth Safe Havens as an end-run in order to maintain their decades-long reign of secrecy and unaccountability” (Holub 2003). 18 Nordic countries do not have baby boxes, and since 1997 there has been on average one newborn death due to abandonment per year in Denmark (with two cases of abandonment survival) and since 1989 only five abandonment cases total in Sweden (Gheorghe et al. 2011). This compares to 40–50 abandonment cases annually in Germany since 2010, and suggests that either baby boxes encourage relinquishment or countries with higher social, health care, and support for families have fewer relinquishments. 19 Opposition in the United States to signing the Convention came from conservative politicians whose constituents argued that the convention would “undermine family rights” particularly by giving children rights that would trump parental authority (see Olsen 1992; Kilbourne 1996). 20 In 2013, the US Supreme Court heard an adoption case in which a girl had been returned to her Cherokee Nation father. The non-Indian adoptive couple fought to reclaim Veronica, who turned four in September 2013 and had lived with her father since she was two years old (Kinnard 2013). Veronica’s mother is not Native American, and had placed her for adoption without consent of Veronica’s father. The court ruled that the father’s custody claims could not be upheld by the Indian Child Welfare Act (Associated Press 2013; Peralta 2013). 21 The National Council for Adoption’s website page on state laws states that about half of all states have a putative father registry, a database that men may join to be notified of custody proceedings. 22 The ACRJ changed its name in 2012 to Forward Together (personal communication with Forward Together, March 12, 2013). 23 Scholars debate when foundling institutions originated (see Viazzo, Bortolotto, and Zanotto 2000, 73–75). 24 This is the case for other places and times (see Fuchs 1984, 1992; Meyer and Oberman 2001; Kramar 2005; Oberman and Meyer 2008; Rattigan 2012). 25 Rescue homes were originally shelters for prostitutes, but between 1910–1920 the focus of the homes changed to cater to unmarried pregnant women (Kunzel 1993, 17). These groups were practically connected: reformers theorized that single mothers were “the victims of failed love affairs, who, condemned by society and family, with no resources and no place to turn for help, would inevitably descend by degrees into prostitution” (Kunzel 1993, 19). 26 Similar themes continue in maternity homes in the United States today, many of which are linked to Evangelical Christian pro-adoption efforts (see Briggs 2012, 13–14; Joyce 2013). Some women have spoken out about coercion. A South Carolina woman found the largest adoption agency, Bethany Christian Services, listed in a 1999 phone book as a crisis pregnancy provider; she was threatened with homelessness when she reconsidered surrendering her newborn daughter (Joyce 2013, 103–04). 27 The source of white babies extended beyond the United States, most specifically in this time period to Ireland, where church- and state-approved systems facilitated

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adoptions to the United States (Milotte 2012). Post-World War II Ireland had a “superabundance of ‘illegitimate’ children” due to the lack of legal contraceptives, social unacceptability of single mothers, and a ban on adoption within Ireland (Milotte 2012, 22). 28 Some activists promote an unassisted birth (also called freebirthing) movement to support childbirth free of medical intervention (Shanley 2012; Moorhead 2013). Freebirthing women have resources and are supported by back-up emergency care, thus are distinct from women targeted by safe haven campaigns (see Edwards 2005; Block 2008; Craven 2010). 29 Situations continue in which women in the United States and other countries are pressed to relinquish babies for adoption without their full knowledge and consent (see Joyce 2013). 30 Based on available US data, the epidemiological risk of neonaticide is ten times higher on the newborn’s first day of life than at any other time (see Herman-Giddens et al. 2003, 1425). This is linked to unassisted childbirths, and between 1983–1991 “95 percent of infants killed during the first day of life were not born in a hospital” (Overpeck et al. 2011, 1214).

Chapter 1. The Work of Saving Babies’ Lives and Souls

1 Evangelical Christian centers (2,300) far outnumber Catholic ones (475); however, Birthright International’s Catholic centers have a longer history (see Kelly 2012, 204, note 5). 2 The same year, the Christian Science Monitor reported only “several dozen” Baskets for Babies volunteers (Teicher 2000). One report explained, “Flyers, posted around southwestern Pennsylvania and aimed at young, pregnant women, describe the process: A mother is asked to put the baby in the basket, ring the bell, and watch from a hiding spot until the infant is taken into the safe house. If the homeowner-volunteer is out, a sign on the front door gives directions to the nearest next basket. There is also a phone number to call for help” (Kadaba 2000, A1). 3 Only ordained priests can perform baptisms, and perhaps Jaccard means he arranges for a baptism. 4 Based on the group’s founding in 1998, Jaccard counseled women through delivery six times in 12 years. 5 In 2011, 23 states allow “Choose Life” or “Respect Life” license plates, with fees between $25–75 over the license plate cost (Guttmacher Institute 2013a; see also Lin and Dailard 2002, 6). In 13 states fees are donated to specific antiabortion groups and crisis pregnancy centers, and in 14 states fees are donated to agencies assisting with adoption (Guttmacher Institute 2013a). Choose Life America, Inc., a nonprofit organization based in Florida, lobbies for the license plates; its website links to the “Option Line” crisis pregnancy line, founded by CareNet and Heartbeat International, which provides referrals to 1,800 crisis pregnancy centers. 6 Munson (2009, 211 at note 12) states that the pro-life movement seeks to change the language from crisis pregnancy centers to pregnancy help centers.

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7 Legal action in some cities and states against CPCs resulted in the mandate that they must post information about the nature of their services (National Abortion Federation 2006; Belluck 2013). End Fake Clinics, a University California, Santa Barbara student organization, successfully lobbied the student government to forbid crisis pregnancy centers from false advertising on campus (Johnson 2012; Thomsen 2013). 8 Some state abortion consent policies and education materials have been shaped in line with these antiabortion strategies; state abortion counseling materials often list crisis pregnancy centers as referral resources (Richardson and Nash 2006, 8; Belluck 2013). 9 Sav-a-Life merged with Care Net in 2005 to become Care Net South (Silverstein 2007, 105–06). 10 An Irish antiabortion group with links to US activists, Family and Life, distributed an advertisement in Irish cinemas in 2007 featuring an empty playground swing and a couple with two children longingly looking at it, imagining their missing child. 11 Antiabortion advocates’ successful arguments to ban late-term abortions in 2003, which they term partial-birth abortions, are undergirded by this boundary blurring (see Morgan and Michaels 1999; Mason 2002, 80–88; Ludlow 2008a). 12 Faris’s emphasis on babies’ faces, symbolizing their unique identities, is repeated by New England Baby Safe Haven advocate Jean Morrisey in nearly the same terms: “One of the things that I just couldn’t get out of my mind was the image of that little angelic face and to see the horrifying effects of what the elements had done to her body and to her face. And that’s an image that will haunt me every day of my life” (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2007c). 13 At this service, a young couple clad in black who were Angela’s “parents” stood on the edge of the crowd, the woman crying and being supported by her boyfriend. The woman stated that she had miscarried and placed the infant in a trash bin. No charges were filed and the LA County Coroner’s office reviewed the case (Glenn 2006). If we believe the mother’s version of the circumstances of Angela’s death, she was not irresponsible by causing death, but was misguided by improperly disposing of a body. 14 Fetal personhood does not only serve antiabortion agendas, as is evident in the proliferation of fetal images in medical practices (offering 3- and 4-D photos); advertisements for books, diapers, telephone services, cars, and music; movies; in-mall photography services (see Georges 1996, 2008; Morgan and Michaels 1999; Mitchell 2001; Gammeltoft 2007; Taylor 2008; Morgan 2009, 27); and rituals for pregnancy loss experienced by women who desperately wanted to continue their pregnancies (Layne 2002). 15 The link to the short PSA I analyzed has been disabled (www.amtchildrenofhope. com/ca_safe_place.php), and a longer version in two parts is posted on YouTube: “Garden of Angels~Please Watch and Share” (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oYXTPgYMD9k). 16 Antiabortion advocates argue that teens concealing pregnancies, and moreover, concealing abortions, is particularly dangerous (Silverstein 2007). Another aspect of

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concealed pregnancy is women who are employed or seeking work and hide their pregnancies in response to fear that they will be penalized if their pregnancy is disclosed (Quart 2012).

Chapter 2. Girls at Risk of Dumping Their Newborns

1 The most active organizations are located in California, Illinois, Florida, New Jersey–New York, and Texas. Baby Safe Haven New England was a dominant organization seeking the passage of Massachusetts’ safe haven law and lobbying in Nebraska and Hawaii. It disbanded in 2012. 2 The organization was founded by AMT Children of Hope’s Tim Jaccard, is based in Occoquan, Virginia, and has a board of directors including other safe haven organization leaders. 3 Illinois’s safe haven organization, the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, states on its website discussion of resources that care is available: “When you take your baby to an Illinois hospital, you may be offered medical care and counseling services. Hospitals may have staff members trained to help you cope and make sure you understand your rights and your options. If you do not want these services, you may simply walk away” (n.d.c). Close attention to language is needed here to see that the law does not require care: “you may” be offered care. Illinois law approves safe haven relinquishments at police stations and staffed fire stations. The organization urges staff to hand the person relinquishing a newborn an Information Packet (in English, Spanish, and Polish) that includes a Mayo Clinic brochure on postpartum self-care. 4 This expansion of the unwanted pregnancy target population is seen in other teen pregnancy-focused groups. For example, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, founded in 1996 in Washington, DC with a goal of reducing teen pregnancy by one-third, reached the goal and renamed itself the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, expanding its focus to women under age thirty. The organization’s website explains this in its FAQs. 5 See Nathanson 1991; Hill Collins 1994; Perales 1995; Hays 1996, 2004; Kaplan and Hochschild 1997; Luker 1997; Roberts 1999; Mullings and Wali 2001; Solinger 2001; Wozniak 2002; Hancock 2004; McCormack 2005; Tapia 2005, 2011; Tolman 2005; LeClair 2006; Fields 2008; Gutiérrez 2008; Jaworski 2009; Reagan 2010; Edin and Kefalas 2011; Lewiecki-Wilson and Cellio 2011; Bridges 2011; Gálvez 2011; Garcia 2012; Kafer 2013. 6 There are sad counterexamples, including a Labor Day weekend case in 2013 of a 19-year-old black student who died alone in her college dorm room due to blood loss after giving birth. The coroner stated, “Had she had medical attention of any kind, she would have lived” (Gary Watts, quoted in Monk 2013). 7 Both in California and Florida, where high-visibility safe haven campaigners keep statistics, illegal abandonments continue. Los Angeles County and Florida data shows the number of safe surrenders versus unsafe abandonments (see Baby Safe LA 2014 and A Safe Haven for Newborns n.d.e).

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8 The context of these comments supports my interpretation. Based on 2011 data, Orange County had a population of 82,500 that was 83 percent white (City-Data.com 2013) and Beaumont, a city of 118,000, was 35 percent white and 47 percent Black (City-Data.com 2012). 9 This coincided with a decision by the California Children and Families Commission, which oversees the distribution earnings from Proposition 10’s state tax on tobacco products, to fund safe haven awareness materials (Lundstrom 2002). 10 In these states, a court petition must be filed to regain custody before parental rights are terminated: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Wyoming (Child Welfare Information Gateway 2010). 11 Illinois’s Save Abandoned Babies Foundation lobbied for the Illinois safe haven law, which passed in 2001 (Laverty 2011). Two years later, the foundation worked with the state to implement the 2003 modified school code, announced on its resources webpage (Save Abandoned Babies n.d.c). The Illinois kit offers resources in a format similar to, but more extensive than, California’s Garden of Angels’–Department of Social Services materials. It contains pamphlets and posters in English, Spanish, and Polish, in recognition of dominant Chicago demographic groups; a PowerPoint presentation and YouTube video clips; wallet cards; and class assignments, including safe haven scenarios and role plays so students can learn “to convince a fearful teenager to safely relinquish an unwanted newborn using the Safe Haven.” 12 Links between safe haven and antiabortion advocacy are evident. Heaton is honored on the Feminists for Life website, and the group reports that an A&E Biography “Primetime Women Week” feature argued that “Heaton uses her fame . . . as a platform to campaign against abortion.”

Chapter 3. Relinquishing Motherhood

1 A CNN clip was posted on the Florida-based Safe Haven for Newborns website in 2011 but removed in 2013. 2 All states require the newborn to be relinquished without signs of abuse, thus there is a question of whether the baby was treated properly. Further, some states require that the safe haven site staff request that the relinquishing mother fill out and return a medical or family background questionnaire. 3 A planned but failed abortion also appears in a Louisiana case, in which a 21-year-old community college student, Ciara Craig, sought an abortion but was told her pregnancy was too advanced. She gave birth alone and threw the bag-wrapped newborn girl into a lake to hide her pregnancy from her parents (Sparacello 2009). 4 As of 2010, either parent may relinquish their baby at a safe haven site in the majority of states. Reported on the Child Welfare Information Gateway website’s Infant Safe Haven Laws page, a person who has the parent’s approval may take a baby to a safe haven in approximately 11 states; in California and Kansas, that person must have legal custody of the infant. Idaho law states that only a custodial parent may make use of a

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safe haven. Seven states offer no legal definition of who is allowed to surrender a newborn at a safe haven. 5 The Bonnie Babes Foundation focused on services for women experiencing miscarriage or stillbirth, including burials (Jeffrey 2004). Jaccard and the Morriseys collaborated in the future for the passage of nationwide state laws, and in 2012, Michael Morrisey and Tim Jaccard served on the Board of the National Baby Safe Haven Alliance. 6 Oprah was not the first to cover this case, but uses it to advocate for safe havens, when other programs do not. On March 3, 2006, the ABC show 20/20 featured Coleman’s case. 7 A novel that supports safe haven laws focuses on a high-achieving white teen who shares Gloria’s experience, serves time, and then takes responsibility for her actions (Efaw 2009). 8 That an above-average teen would give birth alone and hide the baby has high shock value. The Iowa safe haven law was passed after a 17-year-old honors student gave birth alone and her dead baby was discovered (Hadis 2008). 9 This was not the first time Oprah shared publicly this personal history. In 1990, her sister received $19,000 from the tabloid the National Enquirer to expose Oprah as having had “wild and promiscuous early years” (cited in Kelley 2010, 234). This caused a rift in her family, and motivated Oprah to connect “my own sexual promiscuity as a teenager with the sexual abuse I had suffered as a child . . . I had to get rid of the shame I was carrying” (quoted in Kelley 2010, 236). 10 The District of Columbia (Washington, DC) passed a baby safe haven law last, in 2009. 11 The organization formed following a 1991 Harvard Law School conference on child protection reform, as stated in the “About” section of its website. It had a board of directors composed of scholars and nonprofit agency leaders and featured a blog. A lack of sustainable funding led the group to end on March 30, 2012.

Chapter 4. The Unsurpassed Adoption Value of Safe Haven Babies

1 Calling itself an “infant abandonment prevention organization” and not an adoption organization, California-based Project Cuddle facilitates adoptions. AMT Children of Hope reportedly had brokered more adoptions than babies saved from unsafe abandonment between 1998 and 2007 (Buckley 2007). 2 The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act mandates that tribes have jurisdiction “over any child custody proceeding involving an American Indian child” (US Congress, quoted in Jacobson, 2008, 19). See Briggs’s (2012) incisive analysis of the social-political history that led to this act and Hearst (2012) for discussions of specific legal cases. 3 This compares to 37 percent of babies born in 1990 identified as ethnic or racial minorities. 4 At the time of this writing, a US cereal advertisement featuring a white mother, black father, and their young daughter motivated racist responses, and also an Internet

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campaign to recognize that 15 percent of marriages are multiracial (Goyette 2013; We Are the 15 Percent 2013). 5 Adoption policy is a political weapon: in 2013, Russia banned adoptions to the United States (Berry 2013). 6 Demonstrating collaboration, Illinois’s Save Abandoned Babies website (n.d.a) contains the same language. 7 In my analysis of Illinois and Florida’s lists, the approved adoption agencies are about a 50–50 mix of faith-based and services that do not announce a religious affiliation. 8 The “safe have” name is not a typo; Daily Bastardette plays on words. 9 Based on 2004 information; state safe haven policies may be revised. 10 Since 2001 international adoption makes up about 15 percent of all US adoptions, and “the United States is the largest importer of adopted children in the world, a trend that shows no signs of changing” (Gailey 2010, 79). 11 Open adoption is distinct from open records. Carp (1998) traces organized opposition to “sealed records” and the open adoption movement, spearheaded by birth mothers, which formed in the late 1970s within the adoption rights movement (1998, 2004; see also Modell 1994, 2002). Bastard Nation mobilized successfully in Oregon, where voters passed a ballot (Measure 58) to give adoptees the right to access their original birth certificate and birth mothers a right to privacy by filling out a contact preference form (see Carp 2004). 12 The ideal of private adoption matchmaking contrasts with a Project Cuddle case that went awry when the state, following legal protocol, assigned a family to a baby relinquished by a teen at an Ohio hospital safe haven site. The mother included a note with the surrendered baby instructing the hospital to call Project Cuddle because she had already selected a rescue family (Magnusen 2001/2002, 25 at endnote 194). 13 Recognizing the positive opportunity adoption provides gay and lesbian parents, I also acknowledge Briggs’s argument that states’ varying restriction of or support for gay and lesbian adoptive parents is explained not in terms of shifts in equality, but rather in changes in the neoliberal state’s need for adoptive parents to keep state foster system costs down, particularly for “hard to place” children (2012).

Conclusion

1 See Petchesky 1990; Roberts 1999; Martin 2001; Ross et al. 2001; Solinger 2001; Silliman and Bhattacharjee 2002; Nelson 2003; Silliman et al. 2004; Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice 2005; Ginsburg and Rapp 1991, 1995; Smith 2005; Schulz and Mullings 2005; Ehrenreich 2008; Landsman 2008; Flavin 2009; Rapp 1999; Generations Ahead 2009, 2010; Price 2010, 2011; Luna 2009, 2010, 2011; Chrisler 2012; Kafer 2013; Luna and Luker 2013; SisterSong 2013; Thomsen 2013. 2 Newborns relinquished as safe haven babies in Florida, as well as Illinois, Michigan, and Arizona, are placed for adoption by state-approved private agencies. 3 For example, TopMommyBlogs (2013) links to 4,500 blogs.

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References

“Abandoned Babies: The Goal of Daniel’s Law Is Thwarted When a Mother Who Left Her Baby at a Hospital Is Prosecuted.” 2006. Herald-Journal, July 12, A10. “Abandoned Baby Law Publicity Begins.” 2001. The Commercial Appeal, May 29, DS6. Abderholden, Frank. 2007. “Big Baby Shower for Safe Haven: Warren High Drive Helps Care of Abandoned Infants.” News Sun, April 17, 8. Adoption.com. 2013. “Infant Safe Haven Laws.” http://laws.adoption.com/statutes/ infant-safe-haven-laws-2.html. Adoption.com Forums. 2007. “Safe Haven—Baby Moses Support Forum (Read before Posting).” http://forums.adoption.com/safe-haven-support-birthmothers/299696safe-haven-baby-moses-support-forum-read-before-posting.html. Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alix, Laura F. 2008. “Safe Havens Law for Unwanted Newborns Touted.” Journal Inquirer, April 25. www.ct.gov/dcf/lib/dcf/latestnews/safe_havens_law.pdf. “All-American Tragedy.” 2006. Oprah.com. www.oprah.com/oprahshow/ All-American-Tragedy. American Adoption Congress. 2007. “Who We Are: Abandoned Baby Statement.” www.americanadoptioncongress.org/abandoned_baby_statement.php. AMT Children of Hope Foundation. 2007a. “About the AMT Children of Hope Foundation.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/AboutUs.php. ———. 2007b. “Frequently Asked Questions.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/FAQ.php. ———. 2007c. “City Line Program on the Massachusetts Baby Safe Haven Law.” www. amtchildrenofhope.com/mass_city_line.php. ———. 2007d. “Who We Are.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/WhoWeAre.php. ———. 2007e. “Safe Haven Baby New York.” Youtube.com. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aaM3x0lXDa8. ———. 2007f. “Safe Place for Newborns, Minnesota Public Service Announcement.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/mn_safe_place.php. ———. 2007g. “Baby Safe Haven on KLIN.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/klin.php. ———. 2007h. “Baby Safe Haven PIXY 103.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/pixy_103. php. ———. 2010. “Safe Haven Story.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/LatestNewsStory. php?nSI=498564873. ———. 2011. “Foundation Makes Urgent Plea.” www.amtchildrenofhope.com/LatestNewsStory.php?nSI=399368424. 233

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“The Wrong Medium.” 2000. Austin American-Statesman, January 11, A8. Yen, Hope. 2012. “Minority Birth Rate Now Surpasses Whites in US, Census Shows.” Huffington Post, May 17. www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/minorities-birth-ratenow-surpass-whites-in-us-census_n_1523230.html. Yngvesson, Barbara. 2002. “Placing the ‘Gift Child’ in Transnational Adoption.” Law & Society Review 36(2): 227–56. Young, JoAnne. 2008a. “Simpler Safe Haven Proposal Advances.” Lincoln Journal Star, February 1, A1–A2. ———. 2008b. “Older Kids First Uses of Safe Haven.” Lincoln Journal Star, September 16, A1. ———. 2008c. “Officials: Law Not Excuse for Abandonment.” Lincoln Journal Star, September 26, n.p. ———. 2008d. “7 Children in Safe Haven Case Are in City.” Lincoln Journal Star, October 3, B1. ———. 2008e. “Grandmother: I Tried All the Options before Leaving Boy, 12.” Lincoln Journal Star, October 9, A1. ———. 2008f. “Dropoff An Act of Love, Mom Says.” Lincoln Journal Star, October 27, A1. ———. 2008g. “Safe Haven’s Unintended Consequences.” Lincoln Journal Star, November 13, A1. ———. 2009. “Forum Puts Focus on Care: Families at Meeting Address Need for Mental Health and Child Protection System Reform.” Lincoln Journal Star, October 4, B1. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1994. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zoll, Miriam. 2013. Cracked Open: Liberty, Fertility and the Pursuit of High Tech Babies. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, Inc. Zgoba, Kristen M. 2004. “Spin Doctors and Moral Crusaders: The Moral Panic behind Child Safety Legislation.” Criminal Justice Studies 17(4): 385–404.

Index

20/20, 146 23andME.com, 22n16 911 calls, 120

171–72; of safe haven babies, 77, 177, 209n2 adoption, public. See adoption, foster care adoption, transnational, 172–73, 179– abortion. See antiabortion politics 181 abstinence-only education, 100–101, 102–3, adoption system: Adoption and Safe 113 Families Act, 178; advocates of, abused children, 20, 149 21–23; agencies, 176–77; attitudes abused infants, 118n2, 141–42 toward, 35–36; on birth mothers, ACRJ (Asian Communities for Reproduc38; class in, 171, 172; color-blind tive Justice), 27 placements, 169–170, 187; history Adolescent Family Life Act, 101 of, 34–38; identity information in, adoption, foster care, 167–68, 170–71, 177, 22n16; laws of, 166–67; open records 187 in, 22n16, 22n17, 179n11; parental adoption, interracial: Baby Jude’s, 195; rights in, 177–78; race and class decline in, 173; Hammond famaspects, 168–69, 171–72; reform of, ily, 193–95; representations of, 186; 169–170, 178; religious aspects, 181; rescue narratives in, 182; Roberts on, rescue narratives of, 181–82; safe 186–87 haven laws in relation to, 162–63; adoption, open: birth mothers in, 180–81, statistics, 167 183; historical aspects of, 37–38; nature adoption value of safe haven babies: deof, 179–180; open records compared mand and, 174–76; nature of, 165–67; to, 179n11; safe haven compared to, in pubic and private process, 171–72; 192–93 race and class aspects, 168–174 adoption, planned: advocates of, 21–23; adoptive parents and families: celebrole of birth mothers, 179–185; open, rity, 180; discourse re:, 155; gay and 179–180; parental rights and, 177–79; lesbian, 186n13; Hammond family, protocols for, 176–77; risks and, 192– 193–95; Hobbs family, 188–89; 93; safe haven adoption compared to, Krajewskim, 198–200; Ledet fam174–185; transnational compared to, ily, 189–192; Prinnkki family, 189; 179–181 resources of, 170; on safe haven adoption, private: access to, 172; babies, 165–66; safe haven moms mishap, 184n12; public compared and, 195–201 to, 167–68, 170; racial aspects,

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Index

advocacy organizations: antiabortion politics linked to, 62; Baby Safe Haven LA, 119; Baby Safe Haven New England, 80, 96–97, 139n5; burial service organizations, 51–54; discourse of, 59– 63; financing of, 65; Garden of Angels, 65–74, 109–10; Garden of Innocence National, 51–52; motivations of, 49; nature of, 48; networks, 75–76; of Project Cuddle, 12, 145, 150, 181–82, 184; Regan’s Safe Haven for Abandoned Newborns, 19; reproductive justice analysis of, 64; Rest in His Arms, 52; Safe Place for Newborns of Wisconsin, 99–100; Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, 120–21, 176n6; A Secret Safe Place for Babies, 12; significance of, 123–24. See also AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation; A Safe Haven for Newborns; awareness campaigns age requirements: near-miss cases re:, 136–37, 142; in Nebraska, 149–154; older children and, 159–160 Alabama safe haven advocates and advocacy, 12–13 “All-American Tragedy,” 143–49 Allen, Mary Lee, 26 ambulance EMT services, 141 Ambulance Signage Program, 114 AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation: adoption services of, 167n1; Ambulance Signage Program, 114; discourse of, 62; nature and purpose of, 73; origin and purpose of, 54–56; press release, 47; PSA of, 90; in schools, 113; strategies of, 62–63, 70. See also Jaccard, Tim anonymity guarantee: adoptive parents and, 195; criminal justice scholars on, 20–21; effects of, 2, 8–9, 162; entanglements re, 137; reproductive justice analysis of, 219–220; resistance to, 200–201

antiabortion politics: CPCs linked to, 48–49, 57–58; effects of, 41; hidden pregnancies in relation to, 103; role in policymaking, 16–18; safe haven advocacy linked to, 48, 57, 73 Arizona near-miss case, 137 A Safe Haven for Newborns: on adoption, 176; anti-abortion politics linked to, 207; on infant abandonment, 81; PSA of, 92, 93–94; relations with church, 105; on surrenders, 127; testimonial from, 119, 206 A Secret Safe Place for Babies, 12 Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, 27 “Ask a Safe Haven Birthmom!,” 210 Assembly Bill 2817, 109–10 at risk placement period, 196 Austin American-Statesman, 84 awareness campaigns: discourse of, 75–76; the dumpster in, 77–78, 79; effects of, 203; funding of, 20n15; Latinas in, 94; reproductive justice analysis of, 77, 81; results of, 82–83; stereotypes in, 81; teen pregnancy in, 80; videos in, 84–85, 87–90, 93–94. See also advocacy organizations; school-based safe haven education awareness theory, 129 B (safe haven mom), 206–7 babies, reclaiming, 104, 178–79 Baby Abandonment Task Force, 20 Baby Arianna, 189–190 baby boxes, 23–24, 32 Baby Boy Hope, 146 Baby Diamond, 190 baby flaps, 24 Baby Hannah, 124–25 Baby Isabella, 175 Baby James, 194 Baby Jude, 195–97 Baby Lilly, 188

Index

BabyLoveChild, 212 Baby Moses law, 14–15, 84–85 Baby Natalie, 193 Baby Noel Rene, 189 Baby Safe Haven LA, 119 Baby Safe Haven New England, 80, 96–97, 119, 139n5 baby shower celebrations, 110–11 Baby Sunday, 187 Baby Veronica, 25n30 Badinter, Elizabeth, 29, 32 Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (LaddTaylor and Umansky), 3–4 Baskets for Babies, 49–50 Bastard Nation, 22–23, 179n11 Baumgartner, Jennifer, 9n9 Baystate Medical Center, 138 Belluck, Pam, 48 Best, Joel, 8 Bethany Christian Services, 35n26 Birkholz, Patty, 19 birth mothers, 38, 179–185. See also safe haven moms black children, 168–69 black safe haven babies, 186–87 black safe haven families, 189–191 black women, 35–36 blogs and Internet discussion posts, 195– 201, 210, 212 Bloomfield, Billy, 78 Bonnie Babes Foundation, 139n5 border babies, 7n8 Boswell, John, 31 boys and men in safe haven education, 102 Brazilian women, 30 Brettel, Caroline, 39 Bridges, Khiara, 82 Briggs, Laura, 168, 172, 186n13 Brooks, Jodi, 12 burial services and organizations: AMT Children of Hope Foundation, 54;

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antiabortion politics linked to, 73–74; Garden of Angels, 65–74; Garden of Innocence National, 51–52; linked to safe haven advocacy, 52–53; nature and purpose of, 50–51 Burkett, Tricia, 186 Bush, George W., 14 California safe haven advocates and advocacy: Faris, 12, 65, 69–71, 112–13; Garden of Innocence National, 51–52; on requirements, 119–120; Safe Haven LA, 93–94; in schools, 99, 109–10. See also Garden of Angels, Inc.-Safe Surrender for Newborns California safe haven law: logo for, 87; near-miss case, 130–31, 135; requirements of, 119; surrender site, 86 Campbell, Helen, 33 Cape Cod Community College students, 97–98 Care Net, 59–60 Carp, E. Wayne, 173 Carroll, Dr. Pastor Netreia, 52 Catholic Church, 33, 109 celebrity adoptive parents, 180 Centers for Disease Control, 80 Chambers, Ernie, 150, 151 child abuse laws, 20 The Child Catchers (Joyce), 173 child death cases, 15 Children of Hope Foundation. See AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation Children’s Defense Fund, 26 Child Welfare Information Gateway, 139n4 Child Welfare League of America, 20–21 child welfare problems, 152–53 Chinese babies, 173 choice discourse, 218–19 Christian adoption, transnational, 173 Christian Good News Club, 110

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churches. See religion and the church Ciara, Craig, 133n3 Clark, Regan Marie, 19 class in the adoption system, 168–69, 171, 172 CNN, 117 Coleman, Jessica, 143–45 Colen, Shellee, 2 Colorado near-miss case, 134 color-blind adoption placements, 169– 170, 187 Concerned United Birthparents, 38 Connecticut Christmas miracle baby, 124–25, 126 Connecticut safe haven family, 193 CPCs. See crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) crime control theater, 20–21 criminal justice framework, 12–13 criminal justice scholars, 20–21 crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs): advocacy organizations linked to, 57–58; attitudes toward, 60–61; Bethany Christian Services, 35n26; discourse of, 59–60, 61–62; funding of, 59; nature and purpose of, 48–49; Project Cuddle, 181–82; reproductive justice analysis of, 64–65 cross-state surrenders, 152, 153–54, 160 Czech Republic, 24 The Daily Bastardette, 177 Daniels, Bruce, 192 Davey, Elissa, 51 dead newborn cases, 142–150 deform of welfare, 16 De La Rosa far miss, 141–42 Denmark, infant abandonment in, 23n18 DeSoto, Donna, 11–12 Dewhurst, David, 84 “Did You Know” video, 105–9 discourse, safe haven: of AMT, 62; in awareness campaigns, 75–76; of CPCs,

59–60, 61–62; the dumpster in, 77–78, 79; of families, 155; re: maternal love, 179; Sanger on, 41; in school-based education, 76–77; of school-based education, 101–2 District of Columbia safe haven law, 150 Douglas, Susan, 4 Downey, Roma, 65 drug using mothers, 140–41 the dumpster, 77–78, 79 education, safe haven. See awareness campaigns; school-based safe haven education; videos, education egg donors, 4n5 Eisenberg, Wendy, 192 El Paso Times, 132 emergency responders, 120–22, 137–39 enforcement of safe haven laws. See nearmiss cases English law, 24 enslaved women, 30, 191 Europe, infant abandonment in, 32–33 European safe haven programs, 23–24 Falco, Edie, 180 families: adoptive, 165–66, 170, 180, 186n13, 191–93; Baby Jude’s, 195–98; biological, 178; celebrating, 193–95; in the future, 201–2; Hammond family, 193–95; Hobbs,’ 188–89; Krajewskim’s, 198–200; Ledet family, 189–192; Prinnkki family, 189; racial aspects of, 185; representations of, 186–87; safe haven, 155, 185–195; struggling, 151–52; successful, 200 Faris, Debi: activism of, 69; narratives of, 70–71; in schools, 112–13; significance of, 12, 65. See also Garden of Angels, Inc.-Safe Surrender for Newborns fathers and fatherhood: rights of, 25–26, 95, 178; surrenders by, 138–39, 154–59 Federal House Resolution 4222, 20

Index

feminism and feminists: on abstinence only education, 101; on adoption, 215; Baumgartner, 9n9; Briggs, 168; Colen, Shellee, 2; Douglas and Michaels, 4; Feminists for Life, 113n12; Flavin, 15; on good-bad mother framework, 4, 81; Lorber, 29; Ludlow, 9; Morgan and Roberts, 28; on motherhood, 30; NOW, 103; O’Donovan, 24; Petchesky, 218; Roberts, 30, 168, 186–87; Rothman, 31; on sexuality, 101; Solinger, 3, 221. See also reproductive justice analysis financing safe haven organizations, 65 fire stations, 86, 124–25 Flavin, Jeanne, 15 Flood, Katie, 16–161 Florence Crittendon Association, 37 Florida near-miss case, 208–9 Florida safe haven advocates and advocacy. See A Safe Haven for Newborns Forward Together, 27n22 foster care adoption, 167–68, 170–71, 177, 187 foundling institutions, 32, 33–34 France, infant abandonment in, 32 freebirthing, 37n28, 41n30 Fuchs, Rachel, 28, 32, 39 Gailey, Christine Ward, 167, 170, 171, 180 Gandy, Kim, 103 Garcia, Lorena, 101 Garden of Angels, Inc.–Safe Surrender for Newborns: burial services, 66–68; narratives of, 67–68; nature and purpose of, 65, 73; origin of, 12; on school-based education, 109–10; strategies of, 68–71 Garden of Innocence National, 51–52 gay and lesbian parents, 180, 186n13 Gee, Tanya, 12n11 “Georgia’s Story,” 85, 87–90 Geras, Dawn, 152 good-bad mother framework: in awareness campaigns, 78; effects of, 4; femi-

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nists on, 81; impact of, 83; maternal love and, 93; nature of, 71–73; in public policy, 16; representations of, 77; as a reproductive justice issue, 3–4; in safe haven discourse, 2; Sanger on, 5; significance of, 10–11. See also mothers and motherhood, relinquishing Graci, Diane Terlato, 102, 103 Greiner, Marley, 22–23, 177, 212, 214 Griffin, Timothy, 104 Grossman, Amy, 13n13 Gulfport Mississippi case, 142 Gyurkó, Szilvia, 23 Hammond, Michelle, 104 Hammond family, 193–95 Heaton, Patricia, 113 heritage tours, 201 hidden pregnancies: abstinence-only education in relation to, 103; Georgia’s Story, 85, 87–90; judging, 147–48; Morrisey on, 97; Oprah’s, 148–49; representations of, 69–70, 89, 90, 108 Hobbs, Suzanne, 188–89 Hoffman, Nancy Larraine, 12n11 Hollinger, Joan, 26 hospital deliveries, 137 hotlines, 139 Houston safe haven advocates and advocacy, 78 Hungarian safe haven program, 24 Iancu, Otilia, 13–14, 18 ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act), 25, 167n2 identity and silence, 22n16, 162 “I had an abortion” (Baumgartner), 9n9 Indian Child Welfare Act, 25, 167n2 infant abandonment: causes, 28–29; choice in relation to, 218–19; history of, 31–34; international aspects of, 7; prevalence of, 95–96; as a reproductive justice issue, 6; statistics, 7, 20

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infanticide, 30, 38–43 international adoption, 172–73, 179–181 Internet discussion posts and blogs, 195–201 interracial adoption. See adoption, interracial Iowa safe haven law, 143n6 Jaccard, Tim: activism of, 63–64; narratives of, 54, 55–56; role in a near-miss case, 139; relations with Morrisey, 139n5; in schools, 113; significance of, 12. See also AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation Johnson, Joyce, 21 Johnson, Shirley, 19, 165 Joyce, Kathryn, 173, 180 Kelly, Gigi, 49 Kertzer, David, 32–33 The Kindness of Strangers (Boswell), 31 Knights of Columbus, 51 Krajewskim, 198–200 Kramar, Kirsten, 41 Ladd-Taylor, Molly, 3–4, 5, 16 Landsman, Gail, 5 Lane, Sandra, 3n2 Langella, Beverly and David, 165 language of safe haven advocacy. See discourse, safe haven Latinas, representations of, 94, 101, 105 Law, Clarene, 19 laws and legislation: Adolescent Family Life Act, 101; on adoption, 166–67, 178; Assembly Bill 2817, 109–10; in California, 65, 69; on child abuse, 20, 20n14; English law, 24; Federal House Resolution 4222, 20; funding of, 75; ICWA, 25, 167n2; on infanticide, 40; LB157, 153; Pennsylvania’s, 50; Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity

Reconciliation Act, 101; Safe Delivery Law, 212–15; Safe Haven Support Act, 20n15 Ledet Family, 189–191 letters, Dear Birth Mother, 183, 184 Leving, Jeffrey, 25–26 Lifton, Betty Jean, 183 Lorber, Judith, 29–30 Ludlow, Jeannie, 9 Luker, Kristin, 79–80 Magnusen, Debbe, 12, 184 Marre, Diane, 172 Maryland near-miss case, 131 Massachusetts near-miss case, 136–37, 139 maternal love: Fuchs on, 39; history of, 29–31; representations of, 34; in safe haven discourse, 179; significance of, 130. See also mothers and motherhood, relinquishing maternity homes, 35n26, 36–37, 169 May, Elaine Taylor, 35 Melissa (safe haven mom), 212–15 Melosh, Barbara, 9 methodology, 10 Meyer, Cheryl, 41 Micek, Amoria, 154, 155, 157 Michaels, Meredith, 4 Michigan safe haven advocates and advocacy, 102 Miller, Julie, 33 Miller, Monica K., 104 Modell, Judith, 9 Morgan, Lynn, 28, 53 Morrisey, Michael, 80, 96–97, 119, 139n5 motherhood studies, 30 motherless infants, illusion of, 179–185 Mother-Love: Myth and Reality (Badinter), 29 mothers and motherhood, relinquishing: causes and conditions of, 117–18, 126; Coleman, 143–47; complexities of, 161–63; cultural aspects of, 28–42;

Index

decision-making narratives of, 9; decision-making of, 21, 44, 203, 206, 215–16; discourse of, 31; drug users as, 140–41; good-bad framework, 71–73; judging, 127–29; maternal love and, 29–31, 34, 130, 179; motivations for, 91–93; perspectives of, 44–45; representations of, 77, 78, 83; reproductive justice analysis of, 219, 220–21. See also good-bad mother framework Munson, Ziad, 48, 53, 73 myth of the orphan, 180–81 National Association of Black Social Workers, 169 National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, 158–59 National Council for Adoption, 26n21 National Organization of Women, 103 National Safe Haven Alliance: on abstinence-only, 102–3; on interracial adoption, 186; Jaccard and, 64; nature and purpose of, 75; on reclaiming babies, 104 Native American children, 25, 167n2 near-miss cases: complexities of, 162; consequences of, 131; enforcement and, 129–130; extreme, 141–42; fathers and, 138–39; nature of, 117; re: age of child, 136–37; re: drug-using mothers, 140–41; re: hospital deliveries, 137; re: surrender sites, 130–36; rulings on, 129–142; sentencing for, 135; Williams’s, 208–9 Nebraska’s safe haven law: cases, 149–154; in the media, 96–97; modification of, 153, 159–161; response to, 152; significance of, 161; Staton case, 154–59 neonaticide, 39, 41n30, 80 Nespral, Jackie, 93 New Hampshire safe haven advocates and advocacy, 175 New Mexico near miss case, 137

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the new momism, 4 New York Foundling Asylum, 33–34 New York safe haven laws, 120 New York Times, 48, 58–59 Nordic countries, infant abandonment in, 23n18 NOW (National Organization of Women), 103 Obama administration, 101 Oberman, Michelle, 41 O’Brien, Thomas, 139 O’Donnell, Rosie, 180 O’Donovan, Katherine, 24 Of Woman Born (Rich), 30 older children, 151–52, 159–160 Omaha World-Herald, 155, 157 open adoption. See adoption, open open records, 22n16, 22n17, 179n11 Oprah Winfrey Show, 143–49, 188 orphan, myth of, 180–81 Owens, Dedrick, 183 Pahls, Rich, 150–51 Panter-Brick, Catherine, 31 parental rights, relinquishment of, 177–79 parents and guardians, 160 paternal rights. See fathers and fatherhood Patton, Sandra, 182–83 Pennsylvania safe haven advocates and advocacy, 49–50 People, 70–71, 72 Perkins, Tony, 52 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 101 Pertman, Adam, 170, 172 Petchesky, Rosalind, 218 Peterson, Brian, 13n13 Pierce, William, 22 Plale, Jeff, 165 planned adoption. See adoption, planned Planned Parenthood, 18, 74

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political mother blaming, 16 poor mothers, 15–16 poverty and adoption, 168 pregnancy, hidden. See hidden pregnancies pregnancy, teen. See teen pregnancy pregnancy denial, 103 prevention narratives, 47–50, 51 Price, Kimala, 6 Priests for Life, 50 Prinkki family, 189 private adoption. See adoption, private pro-choice and pro-life advocates, 7n7, 18 Project Cuddle: adoption services of, 150, 184; origin of, 12; rescue narrative of, 181–82; video, 145 Pro-Life Action League, 53 psychiatric and behavioral problems, 152, 153–54 public adoption, 167–68, 170, 177 public service announcements (PSAs). See videos, education putative father registry, 26, 178 Quigley, Joan, 77–78 race and racism: ACRJ, 27; in adoption, 35–36, 168–69, 171–72, 173; black safe haven families, 189–191; Chinese babies, 173; egg donors and, 4n5; enslaved women, 30, 191; foster care and, 186–87; infant mortality rates re:, 3n2; Latinas, 94, 101, 105; Native American children, 25, 167n2; in rescue narratives, 182–83; sex education and, 101 Reader’s Digest, 71 reclaiming safe haven babies, 104, 178–79 Regan’s Safe haven for Abandoned Newborns, 19 Reich, Jennifer, 16, 171 religion and the church, role of, 32–33; in adoption, 35n26, 35n27, 173, 181; Christian Good News Club, 110; in rescue narratives, 181–82; Rest in His

Arms, 52; in school-based education, 104–5, 109, 110 relinquishing mothers and motherhood. See mothers and motherhood, relinquishing relinquishment, the term, 9 Rell, Jodi, 126 reproductive justice analysis: arguments of, 216–18; Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, 27; of awareness campaigns, 77, 94; concept of, 7n7; of good-bad mother discourse, 3–4, 81; of Nebraska law, 152, 161; origin and values of, 5–6; problems for, 6, 64–65, 203; of safe haven advocacy, 219; of safe haven laws, 14, 203–4; safe haven organizations in relation to, 64–65; of teen pregnancy, 108–9; of the treatment of mothers, 81; of the use of laws, 118. See also feminism and feminists rescue homes, 35n25 rescue narratives in adoption, 181–82 Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself (Garcia), 101 Rest in His Arms, 52 reunification stories, 201 Rich, Adrienne, 30 Richardson, John, 14–15 Riley, Bob, 79 Roberts, Dorothy, 30, 168, 186–87 Roberts, Elizabeth, 28 Rolland, Kayla, 182–83 roots trips, 201 Rothman, Barbara Katz, 31, 168, 170 Rox (birth mom), 215–18 Russian babies, 173 Safe Delivery Law, 212 safe haven advocacy organizations. See advocacy organizations Safe Haven–Baby Moses Support Forum, 209 “Safe Haven Baby New York,” 90–91

Index

Safe Haven Baby Parade and Walk, 186 safe haven families, 155, 185–195 safe haven laws: as adoption laws, 166–67; adoption of, 11–20, 119; criminal justice framework of, 12; critical perspectives, 20–28; enforcement of, 129–130; first, 50; funding of, 75; international programs, 23–24; national aspects, 119; as nonpartisan, 19; opposition to, 150–51; origin and purpose of, 1–2; prevalence of, 95; on reclaiming babies, 178–79; requirements of, 118n2, 119–123, 136–37, 139n4, 176–77. See also awareness campaigns; nearmiss cases; reproductive justice analysis safe haven moms: adoptive parents on, 195–201; B, 206–7; Melissa, 212–15; perspective of, 207–9; reproductive justice analysis of, 206–7; speaking out, 209– 10; support for, 162; Thanksgivingmom, 210–12; Williams, 208–9. See also mothers and motherhood, relinquishing Safe Place for Newborns of Wisconsin, 99–100 Safranek, Lynn, 155, 158, 159 San Antonio Press, 175 Sanger, Carol: on cause of abandonment, 28; on culture of life, 17–18; on pregnancy denial, 103; on representations of mothers, 5; on safe haven discourse, 41; on surveillance, 74, 98 Sargent, Carol, 16 Savarese, Joanne Terlato, 102–3 Sav Baby, 11 Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, 120– 21, 176n6 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 16, 29, 30 school-based safe haven education: abstinence-only in relation to, 102–3; attitudes toward, 103–4; baby shower celebrations, 111; in CA, 109; Catholic schools, 105; “Did You Know,” 105–9; discourse of, 101–2; legal aspects, 110; nature and purpose of, 98–99; presentations,

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112; reach of, 113; sex education in relation to, 100; significance of, 113–15; teacher kits, 110. See also awareness campaigns sexual abuse, 148–49 sexuality education, 100, 101 Siegel, Deborah, 179–180 Silliman, Jael, 218–19 Silverio, Gloria, 109, 119 Silverio, Nick, 127, 177, 178, 205–6 SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, 6 Skillman, Becky, 193 Smith, Stephanie, 107 social responsibility narratives, 47–48, 49–50 social workers, black, 169 Solinger, Rickie, 3, 221 Somebody’s Children (Briggs), 168 Spinelli, Margaret, 40 Staton family case, 154–59 Stenzel, Paul, 25 sterilization of prisoners, 6n6 St Francis Hospital and Medical Center, 124–25, 126 Strange, Julia, 137 stratification of reproduction, 2 Sturlaugson, Judy, 47 surrender, the term, 9 surrender sites: ambulances, 141; fire stations, 86, 124–25; near miss cases and, 130–36; proper use of, 119–123 surveillance of women and girls: increase in, 114; need for, 96–97; racialized aspects, 104; Sanger on, 74, 98 teenagers relinquished, 151–52, 153–54 teen pregnancy: Garden of Angels on, 69–70; in “Georgia’s Story,” 85, 87–90; Luker on, 79–80; prevention of, 101; representations of, 77–78, 85, 106; reproductive justice analysis of, 108–9; as a social problem, 80–81; stereotypes of, 81–82

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Texas near-miss cases, 132, 141–42 Texas safe haven advocates and advocacy, 14–15, 83–84 Thanksgivingmom, 210–12 They’re All My Children (Wozinak), 170 TIME, 49 Tonaire, Suzanne, 97–98 transnational adoption, 172–73, 179–181 Truelson, Tom, 147 Tyson, John, 12 Umansky, Lauri, 3–4, 5, 16 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 23–25 unwed pregnancy problem, 35–37, 169 US Department of Health and Human Services, 7 US House of Representative House Resolution 465, 20 videos, education: “Baby Moses Safe Haven Law PSA,” 84–85; “Did You Know,” 105–9; “Georgia’s Story,” 85, 87–90; nature and purpose of, 85; Project Cuddles’s, 145; “Safe Haven

Baby New York,” 90; A Safe Haven for Newborns’s, 92; Safe Haven LA’s, 93–94 Voice for Adoption, 22 Ware River case, 139–140 Washington, D.C. safe haven law, 150 Washington near-miss case, 132–33 Weeks, Deanna, 149–150 welfare policies, 15–16, 39 white women, 35–37, 169 Williams, Icilma, 208–9 Winfrey, Oprah, 143–49 Winship near miss case, 130–31 Wisconsin safe haven advocates and advocacy, 99–100, 186, 194 womanhood in relation to motherhood, 29, 30 women, enslaved, 30, 191 women’s health advocates, 26 Woods, Phyllis, 175 Wozniak, Danielle, 170, 171 Wyoming’s safe haven law, 19 Yost, Karl, 146–47 Zeleski, Edward, 143, 147 Zelizer, Viviana, 47

About the Author

Laury Oaks is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Feminist Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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