Emergency room worker Teri Little sensed shame in the teenager’s downcast eyes as the girl entered the waiting room and handed over her secret, 7-pound burden: an infant born just hours before.
“I looked at her and said, `Are you sure?’ ” said Little, recounting how she took the baby girl into her arms.
“She looked up and her eyes watered; I’m trying to keep a poker face, and she said, `Yes, Ma’am.’ She put her head down and she was gone.”
The infant was the first of five so far that have been dropped off in Mobile County emergency rooms under a 16-month-old program that allows mothers to give up their unwanted newborns within 72 hours of birth without fear of prosecution for abandoning them.
No identification required, no questions asked.
Although disconcerting to some, the policy is designed to help save the newborns of troubled young mothers who might otherwise abandon them in an unsafe place, and has a growing number of converts across the country.
“Yes, there are problems, there are complications,” said Mobile County District Atty. John Tyson Jr., credited with establishing the policy after local television reporter Jodi Brooks pushed the idea. “But we would rather have a live, healthy baby than we would a corpse or maimed child.”
Texas last fall became the first state to pass a law granting immunity to women who turn in their infants within 30 days of birth, following a period of 13 babies abandoned within 10 months.
Highway billboards there urge reluctant mothers to leave their children with emergency medical workers rather than in garbage bins.
Twenty-four states–including Illinois–now are considering similar legislation, according to the National Conference on State Legislatures. The proposed bills vary only in details, such as age of the baby, eligible safe places and to what extent fathers should be involved.
Last month an aide to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley also started gathering information about the program by consulting with Tyson. No statistics are kept locally on the problem, but over the last two years children have been found abandoned in a shopping cart on the Near West Side, outside Sherman Hospital in South Elgin, in a bathroom at Westlake Community Hospital in Melrose Park and in the emergency room of Edward Hospital in Naperville. All were found alive.
As recently as Feb. 22, an Ameritech employee found a healthy newborn boy tucked under shrubs behind a building in Chicago Heights. A woman believed to be his 35-year-old mother has been charged with one felony count of child abandonment.
“It’s an interesting idea, but it’s fraught with potential problems if it is not done well,” said Rebecca Levine, a senior policy assistant for Daley. “It’s not going anywhere at this point.”
Levine said she was unsure how well a large social service bureaucracy such as Chicago’s might handle this kind of program.
In Pittsburgh, more than 600 volunteers put out baby baskets lined with warm blankets and leave their porch lights on to provide crisis-ridden mothers another option.
The number of newborns found abandoned in public places jumped from 65 in 1991 to 105 in 1998, according to a survey of media reports by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Nearly one-third of those 105 infants were found dead.
Experts suspect that these reported cases represent only a fraction of all infant deaths from abandonment.
Meanwhile, the number of newborns left by or removed from mothers in hospitals because they are deemed unfit or drug-addicted rose from an estimated 22,000 in 1991 to 31,000 in 1998, according to HHS. Those children are then placed with 540,000 others who currently live in foster care nationwide.
Aside from immaturity, no demographic profile explains what kind of mother would abandon an infant.
“It’s an act by a desperate, ignorant individual who doesn’t know there are options available to her,” said Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Kharfen.
Among the five mothers who have taken advantage of Mobile’s program, called A Secret Safe Place for Newborns, the babies’ parents have been black and white, upper income and lower income. One of the newborns was returned to his mother, who came back for him the next day, and the rest were put up for adoption.
Since the program started in November 1998, Mobile County also has seen the case of one baby left in the woods to die. Two sanitation workers found the boy covered in maggots but alive, and doctors quickly nursed him back to health before placing him in foster care.
What the mothers tend to have in common is their youth and respective crises. Some fear embarrassment. Some have either hidden or denied the pregnancy so long they are perplexed by their own childbirth. Some fear punishment by parents.
In the latter category is a young woman from the neighboring town of Daphne, whose quavering voice on a minutelong tape tells the police dispatcher she has just left her newborn under a bush near an apartment complex.
“I’m 15 years old and just had a baby,” she says unsteadily to the police dispatcher.
“Would you like to talk to a counselor?”
“My mom’s gonna get me,” sobbed the girl who called herself “Julie” shortly before hanging up. She feared what repercussions might come when her family inevitably would learn the baby’s father was not white.
By the time Daphne Police located the shopping bag and carefully unwrapped the towel to find insects crawling about the tiny girl’s lifeless face, it was too late.
Those who abandon newborns in Alabama can be punished with up to a year in jail.
In a nearby cemetery under a sprawling oak is a simple headstone for Baby Jane Doe, whose tragedy is captured in the engraving describing her short life: “September 26, 1997; September 26, 1997.” A small teddy bear dirtied by many intervening rains rests atop her simple marker.
Daphne Police Officer Colleen McNorton visits that spot regularly and has made it her quiet mission to find Baby Doe’s mother. Abandoned herself 47 years ago on the streets of Chicago, McNorton said she wishes to find Baby Jane’s mother for conflicting reasons: to give her counseling, closure and justice.
Though introduced to the world in the same precarious way, McNorton’s story is happier. Every year on Feb. 26, the date she believes to be her birthday, McNorton lights a candle for the woman who delivered her into safe hands on a blustery day in 1953. She suspects she was dropped on the doorstep of either a downtown Chicago Police station or St. Vincent’s orphanage on LaSalle Street. McNorton expresses no desire to meet her, but wishes instead to give silent thanks.
“I have nothing but admiration for what she did,” said McNorton, whose adoptive parents moved from Chicago to Mobile when she was 14. “It isn’t that I think of her only on my birthday, but I know that she’s thinking of me specifically on that day.”
A 14-year veteran of the Mobile and Daphne Police Departments and grandmother of one, McNorton says that with enough public promotion of A Secret Safe Place, distraught mothers who don’t want their babies will feel comfortable with another option.
But in California, the founder of a national hot line for pregnant women considering abandoning their babies thinks A Secret Safe Place sends the wrong message and addresses the problem too late in the process.
“Why have the government pay to educate people on how to abandon their baby when we can educate them in how to prevent it?” said Debbe Magnusen, who founded the Costa Mesa-based Project Cuddle. “Ours is a safe, legal way to deal with the problem.”
Magnusen claims her program has saved nearly 200 babies in the last 3 1/2 years by providing counseling and assistance to the troubled women before they deliver.
Magnusen also said women in this predicament tend to be distrustful of authorities and concerned that hospital or fire station cameras might expose them.
“Many of these girls have been in foster care; they’re afraid of the system,” she said.
The idea for A Secret Safe Place for Newborns emerged from disgust. New to Mobile, television reporter Jodi Brooks had just finished covering the murder trial of a well-to-do mother who drowned her 8-pound newborn boy in the toilet with the help of the grandmother. This wasn’t Brooks’ first time covering stories about unwanted newborns.
“I said, `This doesn’t have to happen,’ ” said Brooks, who last month testified about the program before the Alabama Legislature. “I’m a member of the community and if there’s a solution to this complex problem I’m not going to sit here and do nothing. How can you argue with saving all these lives?”
