Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization
PO Box 4607
New Windsor, New York 12553-7845
614-795-6819
bastards.org bastards3 @gmail.com @bastardnation@bsky.social
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Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now
6537 S. Staples Drive, Ste 125
Corpus Christi, Texas 78412
stopbbnow.org stopbabyboxesnow@gmail.com
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Submitted Testimony/Letter
HB350
Newborn Safety Device/Safe Haven Baby Box Authorization
Georgia House Safety and Homeland Security Committee
February 19, 2025
OPPOSE
Submitted/Letter Testimony
by
Marley E. Greiner, Executive Chair. Bastard Nation
This is joint testimony submitted by Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization and Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now. I am the Executive Chair of BN and the owner of SSHBBN, the largest baby box information. educational and media resource website in the world. I apologize for the lateness of this testimony/letter but I only learned of the hearing this morning.
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Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization is the largest adoptee civil rights organization in the United States. We support only full unrestricted access for all adopted persons to their original birth certificates (OBC) and related documents.
Since 2016 we have opposed “Safe Haven Baby Boxes” that allow parents to anonymously stick their infant in a box in a wall and walk away.
On a personal note, I am a former resident of Radium Springs and Albany.
We urge you: DO NOT PASS HB350
This testimony has 2 parts (1) a general over-view of why baby abandonment boxes are bad and (2) our easy-to-follow Talking Points attached at the bottom of the testimony.
The promotion and use of Safe Haven Baby Boxes is anti-adoptee, anti-adoption, anti-family, and unethical. Boxes are unregulated by law and a danger to the physical and mental/emotional health of mother and child. (Two deaths are related to box use. In Idaho a deceased newborn was placed in a box. In an unknown state, but reported online by baby box promoters, a mother overdosed and died a few hours after boxing her baby.) They promulgate the old secret system that adopted people have battled for over 70 years to abolish.
Baby abandonment box promoters subscribe, whether or not they realize it, to the long-discredited “blank slate” theory of adoption, reducing adoptees (whom they assume box babies will become) to familyless, historyless commodities—gifts given to strangers with no thought of the consequences to infant legal and psychological welfare or that of their biological parents.
Instead, advocates promote boxes as a consumerist “choice”– a simple solution for parents (usually mothers) so “desperate” that unless they can dump their newborns anonymously in a box-in-a-wall they will kill them or at least discard them dangerously. Proponents simultaneously claim these dangerous parents love their babies and want protect them from harm and not kill them. When asked to provide evidence of the efficacy of baby abandonment boxes, advocates can cite no studies or facts–only an intuitive “we just know.” The fact is that the number of reported dangerous discard cases throughout the US has remained steady for decades.
Recently the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University’s Infant Abandonment Working Group, published the important Legislative Report: US Policy Responses to Infant Abandonment and Infanticide (download at bioethics.yale.edu/infant_abandonment), late last year. It and other documents on the Center’s baby abandonment page are essential to understanding why these boxes are a bad idea. Although the report is not comprehensive, this is to my knowledge, the first study of the use and efficacy of “newborn safety devices.” The Center also sent an open letter to HSS supported by over 100 child welfare and maternal health scholars, clinicians, legislators and policymakers, educators, advocates, legal professionals, indigenous leaders, and concerned citizens from across the US to request increased HHS involvement in public health policy responses to crisis pregnancies and asking for oversight of the rapidly expanding network of unregulated baby abandonment boxes. (These documents and more are available at the general working group link above.)
Please don’t think that these abandonment boxes are free as advertised by Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc, the non-profit Christian ministry that controls the entire baby box industry from bill-writing and lobbying to manufacture to installation to hotline to promotion to media. They frequently use babies boxed through their program in public events and fundraisers, a practice that adopted people find exploitative and manipulative. We don’t like to see adoptees used.
The organization initially operated on voluntary donations from individuals, ministries, fraternal organizations, non-profits, and foundations, It still collects substantial funds from them, but in the last couple of years states and local jurisdictions have diverted taxpayer dollars to pay for them.
This year, the Wyoming legislature rejected a bill, before it was even officially introduced, to allocate $300,000 and possibly more to pay for boxes, even though no discards were reported for at least 8 years. Yesterday the North Dakota House Appropriations Committee recommended Do No Pass on a bill that allocated $100,00 to fund boxes in that state.In the past couple of years, Indiana allocated $1,000,000. New Mexico,with no box law on the books, $330,000. San Antonio, Texas allocated nearly $450,000 for 12 boxes. They have not been installed because the City Attorney doesn’t like the company’s contract demands on the city. Some locations have taken money from COVID and Homeland Security accounts. In Union Township, Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, township trustees decided it would be OK to bypass Ohio law requiring 24/7staffing at box locations. When a local man discovered, upon visiting the fire station, that it was unstaffed with a working box in its wall, the trustees decided to hire an extra firefighter to babysit the facility; thus, taxpayers were dunned not only the cost of the box but paying an extra full-time firefighter at union scale with benefits. Ohio has had 1 box case 6 years
Not one adoptee rights, birthparent rights, or adoption reform organization in the United States supports the legalization and installation of baby abandonment boxes. Although, the current Safe Haven Baby Box initiative is a natural outgrowth of the Safe Haven movement, traditional Safe Haven organizations —the very people who developed Safe Haven laws–- oppose baby boxes. Here is a link to organizations throughout the US that oppose boxes.
The adoptee voice has been ignored in baby box discourse by design. We trust you will listen to us. Advocates and SHBB Inc in particular, refuse to respond to adoptee objections in any serious manner. The company’s hotline operator and counselor publicly called adoptees who object to boxes “mentally unstable.” The founder of the company said on TikTok, “So take your little trauma narrative and go somewhere else.” The overall response, when given, is “you hate adoption.”
What we hate are deceptive relinquishment practices, rooted in shame and secrecy that lead to drastic permanent solutions to temporary problems and deny the babies who are adopted under this system, when they grow-up, their birth and adoption records, histories, and context.
What we demand is ethics and accountability in adoption and related childcare practices, not a band-aid solution to social, political, and mental health problems that cause newborn discard to happen.
Please vote DO NOT PASS. It’s the right thing to do.
Thank you.
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Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!
Why We Oppose Safe Haven Baby Boxes
Adoptee rights and adoption reform organizations throughout the United States oppose deceptive relinquishment practices that are rooted in shame and secrecy, lead to drastic permanent solutions to temporary problems, and create a population of adopted people who have no birth records, identity, or history.
We seek ethics, transparency, and accountability in adoption and in related child welfare practices, not band-aid and gimmick solutions to social, political, and mental health problems that cause newborn discards. Contrary to long-standing and established child welfare policies, the use of baby boxes (sometimes called “newborn safety devices”):
- Creates a secretive and shadow child welfare system that eliminates informed consent, a child’s identifying information, and any record of the social and medical histories of newborns. Baby boxes operate to eliminate a child’s right to identity by eliminating accurate birth registrations and records.
- Commodifies infants and normalizes “legal” baby abandonment as a consumer choice, without acknowledging the lifetime psychological consequences for the baby and the mother, including, but not limited to, abandonment issues, shame, guilt, substance abuse, depression, low self-esteem, and suicidal ideation. Boxes represent state-promoted throwaway culture; some critics call them instruments of child abuse.
- Replaces professional best practice standards with unprofessional and unethical “relinquishment” procedures. Baby boxes instead give vulnerable parents a right to abandon an infant out of convenience or ignorance, with no counseling, documentation, or discussion of established alternatives, such as adequate medical care, financial and material family preservation assistance, or crisis nurseries.
- Deprives the non-surrendering parent of the right to rear her or his own child. Baby boxes eliminate any protections to prove that a person using the box has a legal right to surrender the baby. Embarrassed, frightened, or abusive partners, spouses or family members, and even sex traffickers, will use (and undoubtedly have used) baby boxes without the consent or knowledge of the (other) parent, with no repercussions. Baby box proponents dismiss the real, dangerous, and violent situations experienced by women, simply advocating that “if your baby is taken, just call the police.”
- Disenfranchises natural parents—particularly the non-surrendering parent (usually the father)—of their right to due process by eliminating their ability to locate the child, thus denying them knowledge of (among other things) the dependency proceeding to which they are a party. State-based Putative Father Registries, touted as a safeguard, are rendered useless since records are filed by the name of the mother who remains anonymous by law.
- Creates at-risk adoptions due to possible litigation from the non-surrendering parent or biological family members who may learn of the abandonment and seek custody.
- Contravenes family reunification guidelines of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA) and dispenses with tribal rights embedded in the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which can also lead to federal litigation.
- Encourages women to keep problematic pregnancies a secret. The promotion of baby boxes discourages family and professional communication and eliminates assistance for sexual and physical abuse, mental illness, substance abuse, and social isolation—factors that cause nearly every newborn discard. Studies indicate that once a pregnancy is acknowledged and discussed the chance of discard almost always disappears.
- Hides crimes such as rape, incest, spousal and partner abuse, and human trafficking.
- Promotes and supports the non-profit ministry Safe Have Baby Boxes, Inc., a million-dollar corporation that controls the manufacture, promotion, sales, installation, and referral of women to baby boxes in the United States. It has created the baby box market and lobbies legislatures, produces boxes at its own factory, installs the devices, operates a hotline that refers pregnant women to box locations near them, and holds press conferences when a newborn is left in a box. Rather than protect legitimate privacy interests of the infant, it uses boxed children as fundraising tools for its ministry.
- Discourages women from seeking pre-and post-natal care, instead encouraging dangerous and unsafe unattended births in the community, outside of a hospital.
Baby boxes do not address the causes of infant discard. Anonymously dropping a baby into a box and walking away does not obviate or solve the root causes of newborn discard/neo-naticide, which are:
- poverty
- inability to secure affordable medical treatment and reproductive health care
- denial or ignorance of pregnancy
- draconian immigration policies and practices
- substance abuse and physical and sexual abuse
- shame, crime, mental illness, dysfunctional families, social isolation, and poor communication skills.
More Information: Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now
Marley Greiner 614) 795-6819
stopshbbnow.org
2023 Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!
6537 S. Staples Street, Suite 125, Corpus Christi, Texas 78413-5423
(614-795-6819 * stopshbbnow. org