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This last session Kentucky lawmakers unanimously passed HB272. The bill amends the state’s current SH/SHBB law to require all public schools in the state to display the Safe Haven Baby Box Inc hotline number for students to call about their untimely pregnancies and “solution.” (We don’t know if this includes public universities). We missed this bill somehow–not that it matters. Kentucky lawmakers are mad about Monica, and as of this writing, over 40 baby boxes litter Kentucky’s cityscapes with 4 captures since 2021.
Every public school shall prominently display the statewide child abuse
hotline number administered by the Cabinet for Health and Family Services,
[and ]the National Human Trafficking Reporting Hotline number
administered by the United States Department for Health and Human
Services, and the Safe Haven Baby Boxes Crisis Line number administered by the Safe Haven Baby Boxes national organization or any equivalentsuccessor entity.
We want to make clear that we have no objection to the posting of the child abuse and human trafficking hotline number requirements already in place.
The state, however, has no business posting and encouraging minors to contact a privately operated million-dollar corporation/Christian ministry that manufactures and leases Safe Haven Baby Boxes to discuss their teen callers’ pregnancies and “alternatives” to safe standard pregnancy care, delivery, and aftercare–standards that reject concealment of pregnancy and birth, and how to legally and anonymously dispose of newborns via their Safe Haven Baby Box program. Imagine the screaming that would be heard outbound from Frankfort to Padukah, to Bowling Green, to Ashland, to Covington if this were a hotline for abortion services!
Kentucky is one of the most adopteephobic states in the US. Its adult adoptees are forced to beg a judge to grant them a court order to inspect much less receive their original birth certificates and then only with birthmother consent. We don’t know how many certs have been released that way, but it’s safe to say very few.
At least, under this current Draconian and archaic law, there is a birth record that might be released to adoptees through either that humiliating court order or hopefully through a change in law. Under baby boxing no such record even exists,; thus, burying The Boxed in an inescapable law-enforced memory hole that not only denies and erases identities and histories in practice but the civil right to their own state-generated legal documents and collected information, which can’t exist due to state law. All this to protect the alleged comfort zone of a minuscule handful of anonymous (mainly) mothers manipulated by SHBB Inc propaganda, supposedly fearful of stigma, shame, or exposure decades down the line. How does encouraging young mothers to sneak around in the middle of the night to toss their newborns into an abandonment box-in-the-wall NOT portray the pregnancy, birth, and boxing as shameful?
Kentucky’s SHBB law and the frequent amendments lawmakers pass tighten the state’s grip on adoptee identity and rights for all the state’s adoptees, making it more unlikely for its adoptees (it is inconceivable that an SHBB baby would NOT be adopted) ever to enjoy equal legal status with the Not Adopted.
In response to this argument, Mrs. Kelsey claims that baby box abandonment is a conventional adoption legal procedure. An SHBB “surrender” is no different from a closed adoption where actual records exist!
When people say “I’m against baby boxes” because it denies the child’s rights to know their bio parents… so you hate closed adoptions? Ok, got it! Next!!!!!!…Facebook May 8, 2021
Mrs. Kelsey was surrendered into the closed adoption system. She admits in her memoir Blessed to Have Been Abandoned, that she suffered from feelings of unworthiness, abandonment, and the “need to know.” She searched and was reunited in a good relationship with her late birthmother. Yet she advocates not only for the maintenance of the closed system that dogged her personally and creates lifelong problems–even trauma–for nearly all adoptees, but for the creation of additional layers of seals and secrecy that can be impossible to break.
For a deeper dive into Mrs. Kelsey’s rejection of adoptee right s, read my July 1, 2024 blog: Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc Reminds Us Again: Adoptees Don’t Matter. A Disjointed Diatribe where I concluded:
Under the baby box regime, our civil rights don’t exist. We don’t exist as a class or as individuals unless we join their gratitudinal party line or can be paraded around in their dog and pony $how.
Surprised on some level that the KY legislature would encourage minors to explore arrangements for their pregnancies without parental knowledge or consent. Seems like an odd thing for a Republican body to do. The legislature didn’t even ask parents if they’d want the number to be posted in all public schools for their children to call (even elementary schools, kindergartens?).
They also seem to be oblivious to how safe havens are themselves a form of human trafficking.
Thanks for postiing, Toff. Great comments. wrote a long response and poof! It went into cyberspace, nuked forever. I will reconstruct later, but I need to get Mari’s memorial page design for the BN page. I will be back in the next day or so to start over.
So in 3 years, there have been 3 surrenders. How is this an improvement on any other form of giving up a child through the existing system??
It’s not. It’s all propaganda. Angelika is about to publish a pretty short piece on a ridiculous piece of propaganda generated in Texas.