The Tennessean reports that gentleman in Nashville (who is wisely only speaking to the police about this matter) found a sunburnt, but otherwise healthy, baby girl in his front yard on Sunday morning.
Given the extreme unlikelihood that she grew out of his lawn, one can safely assume that she was abandoned there. One might also assume that she was abandoned there by her confused and distressed mother.
But we might never know.
Unless someone steps forward and either claims the baby as their own or is able to help in identifying the baby’s parents, chances are that she will disappear into the child welfare system. (We can only hope that she fares better than Masha or Candace.)
Responses to the Tennessean are predictably indignant, with people wondering why, since Tennessee has a safe-haven law, someone would just leave their baby on the front lawn of someone’s home.
And we might never know.
One of the consequences of anonymous abandonment, whether through the legal “safe haven” route or an illegal “dumping” in a garbage can, church doorstep or a Nashville lawn, is that we simply don’t know anything about the circumstances of the abandonment. We don’t know who left the baby, we don’t know why they left the baby, and we don’t have any idea of what happened to the baby’s mother. She may be alive and well and going back to school, or her mutilated corpse may be lying in a ditch somewhere.
According to the New York Times the effectiveness of these laws is hard to gauge, and people still abandon and kill newborns anyway. One aspect of these laws is that while they tend to be very particular about the circumstances under which a child might be abandoned (i.e. the baby must be less than 72 hours old, the child must be left at a hospital, fire or police station, can only be left by his/her mother, etc), communicating these restrictions to those who might kill or abandon a baby is another matter entirely. In my opinion, these laws may have the unintended effect of increasing “unsafe” abandonments rather than curbing them.
Think about it: If a woman is unable to even consider picking up the phone and calling 911 after giving birth alone, what is the likelihood that she has researched safe haven laws? While she might have heard that it was “ok” for her to abandon her baby, what makes us think that someone who is this dysfunctional is going to understand the nuances of a safe haven law?
But of course, because abandonments are anonymous, without law enforcement getting lucky in an investigation, we will never know the impact these laws had on someone’s decision to abandon their child.
What we do know is this: Somebody gave birth to a baby girl. Somebody didn’t kill that baby girl. Somebody left that baby girl where she would be found, but made no effort to alert people to the presence of the baby girl or to protect her from the elements. We know nothing about this somebody, and we don’t even know if there was only one somebody, or whether there were multiple somebodies.
We also know that Safe Haven laws didn’t protect this baby from the sun that burned her tiny body and they are not going to protect her mother who appears to be the chief suspect in this crime. We know nothing about how the Safe Haven law may have confused somebody into thinking that abandoning a child was ok.
In short, when it comes to most of the crucial details of this case (and the effect of Safe Haven laws in general) we know nothing.
(Seems that many adoptees have heard that one before.)
Happy Monday.
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