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Last Thursday (May 24) the Alabama House passed HB 473, an amendment to the state’s traditional Safe Haven law that authorizes the use of Safe Haven Baby Boxes. The bill reportedly was spearheaded by Kids to Love Foundation, a licensed foster care and adoption agency, located in Madison Alabama. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall sits on its board. The measure was sponsored by Rep. Donna Givens (R-Loxley) with 34 co-sponsors. It passed 100-0 with 3 abstentions (no reason given). The bill was only introduced on May 16 and fast-tracked to victory. The day it passed the House, (May 24) it was sent lickety-split to the Senate Veterans and Military Committee (huh?) where it was recommended for passage and sent immediately to the Senate floor where it received two readings and scheduled for a floor vote. On May 31, H374 passed the Senate 31-0. Governor Kay Ivey is expected to sign it.
Background
The current Alabama law, passed in 2002, is based on Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson, Jr’s 1998 A Secret Safe Place for Newborns program, which let so-called “mothers in crisis” at risk of discarding their newborns, to surrender their babies for adoption anonymously with no counseling, paperwork, or questions at ERs in Mobile County. (Tyson received an award from Harvard’s Kennedy School Ashe Center for Democratic Governance for his work; thus, stamping an imprimatur of liberalism on the reactionary project.) Tyson’s program was the first Safe Haven program in the country and served as a model for other states, The law has, unlike laws in other states, remained barebones. Babies no older than three days (72 hours) can be surrendered by a parent under Safe Haven protocols but only at hospitals. with emergency services. I am unable to find the number of newborns run through the program, but an article from 2008 claimed 35. It is doubtful if any were saved from anything other than knowing their own identities, origins, and a genuine official record of their birth.
H473 fleshes out the bones a little, but unlike some states that have thrown in the kitchen sink allowing babies as old as one year to be test-driven, then dropped off not only at traditional locations, but with dentists, chiropodists, churches, and adoption agencies. Besides adding baby boxes to the Safe Haven scheme, H473 raises the age frame from 3 to 45 days, (gotta get those post-partum depressives!) and adds fire stations with 24/7 staff with at least one certified EMT on duty as drop-off points.
The bill also allows mothers that give birth in hospitals to anonymously relinquish under Safe Haven protocols. Her name will not appear on the original birth certificate. It cannot be revealed to “any other individual or entity including state and local agencies.” (Does this mean that SHBB Inc will be disallowed from pimping “their” babies –at least until grateful adopters have their black-hole babies free and clear –by running to their Indiana baby box savior to help churn her Mighty Publicity Wurlitzer?) Mothers’ names, however, will be used for billing purposes. (seriously!) or to apply for Medicaid. if they are minors (seriously!) The parents or guardians of minors using the program will not be contacted without the consent of the mother. Abortion is now banned in the state, but under Alabama’s previous law, which remains on the books, minors were required to obtain parental or guardian consent to obtain an abortion (considered unhealthy and dangerous) while a Safe Haven secret pregnancy/birth and post-birth boxing is, according to the state, healthy and safe as long as the newborn is by a government-approved method. So much for”conservative” rants over “parental rights.”
In April, a somewhat similar bill, SB209, which did not include baby boxes, died in committee. Sponsored by Sen Larry Stutts, it retained the 3-day age frame; expanded drop-off locations to fire stations, emergency medical stations, and law enforcement agencies; and included Safe Haven “protections.” for hospital births. Custody would be given to the DHS but adoption placement would be turned over to licensed private adoption agencies. According to Stutts, the bill died because DHS objected to the expanded drop-off locations–a weird objection that appears to be a politically constructed excuse to deflect questions from nosy reporters (an unlikely event) or genuine baby box opposition (like us). Those additional locations –particularly fire stations– have been written into nearly every state law for over 20 years and the vast majority of baby boxes are at fire stations.
This scenario seems even more probable in light of Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Human Resources, Johnathan Schlekner’s enthusiastic endorsement of HB 374:
[I] hope over time that more fire stations and more others will step forward and be willing to take on the burden of having a baby box
Clearly, the problem with Strutt’s bill was not locations. A political campaign for Safe Haven Boxes was in play and any plan to amend Alabama’s long-standing pioneer law without them was not acceptable to certain players inside and outside the state.
An Abortion “Solution”
Since June 2022, abortion has been banned with two very tight exceptions in Alabama. Due to a ruling by the FDA, the “abortion pill,” used up to 10-12 weeks of pregnancy, in theory, is available through retail pharmacies and mail-order companies but it’s unclear from my quick ‘net research today, how well ‘that’s working out. Underground care networks are also running. Every online site I looked at was understandably hush-hus,h: contact us and we can talk.
Since people like Rep Givens are legislatively forcing women to remain pregnant for whatever reason they don’t want to be, the lawmaker admits to promoting HB374 and baby boxes, as a necessary and helpful solution to unwanted pregnancies for women and the state. In other words, Safe Haven procedures are a safe way out for reluctant mothers or those unable to care for their babies who otherwise would allegedly kill their born babies, since, after all, they considered aborting a zygote earlier. From the way she talks, you’d think newborn murder is the default and there are no other options for new mothers in “crisis situations” other than filling Alabama’s trashcans with dead newborns.
Echoing Allan Parker and the Justice Foundations 2020 press release plea (and here) to pregnant people during the height of Covid to hold on to their pregnancies and then dump their baby on the ER counter, and walk, Givens told WBRC-TV (Birmingham) how anonymously abandoning babies is good for women (aka potential murderers) and can set their lives straight away from the slammer.
So it’s protecting a baby, a young life that cannot care for itself,” …But it’s also giving an opportunity for these young mothers, these young ladies that find themselves being young mothers. It gives them the opportunity to do the right thing. It helps keep them on the right path.
WTVM-TV (Birmingham) reported Givens arguing:
We want the young ladies to give birth to the babies and not abort the babies. So, encouraging them to do that, we need to provide for them. Help those that think they cannot care for their newborn babies,
Someone, please send this woman a copy of The Girls Who Went Away or A Hole in My Heart.
Clearly, Givens doesn’t think much of women, but she thinks even less of adopted, people, especially those in Alabama who have had unrestricted access to their Original Birth Certificates for over 20 years. How do they feel about the abrogation of adoptee civil rights HB374 encourages? How about those safe havened and boxed babies she so dearly cares about that will never be able to exercise that right if she can help it?
Givens’s neglect and de-centering of Alabama’s Class Bastard suggests, ”
Just crawl back into that box until you can show me some gratitude!
The traditional adoption mantra, “your mother loved you so much that she gave you away” is refined by Givens and her legislative cronies to “your mother loved you so much she didn’t kill you.”
We are simply an invisible commodity to fill the empty arms of the childless and desperate and make politicians feel good about themselves. We are disrupters of the bourgeois family narrative. The adopteephobia–adoption mindfuck– never stops.
Someone, please send this woman The Bastard Chronicles, Adoption Politics: Bastard Nation and Ballot Measure 58, or Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption.
Finally, in her campaign to stop abortion via Safe Haven laws and baby boxes, Rep GIvens ignores that the National Safe Havern Alliance, which objects baby boxes, promotes trad SH use, and has repeatedly asked that Safe Haven discourse be de-linked from abortion, especially after Dobbs. Monica Kelsey, founder and CEO of SHBB Inc pretends to discourage the link, but her pre-box anti-abortion work and her association with SHBB Inc board member and hotline coordinator/counselor Pam Stenzel, for decades a leader in purity/abstinence education and CPC operator tell a different story.
Someone, please send this woman a link to Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!
Moral Panic
In case you’re wondering if Alabama is the epicenter of neonaticide,the answer is NO. According to Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc ‘s own stats, as of May 17, 2023, there have been three reported abandoned babies since 2017. THREE!
Lack of actual facts, of course, won’t dissuade Rep Givens from enriching her moral panic and her campaign to invent an absurd solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. She has lined up anonymous (what else!) funding from a constituent in Baldwin County to fund Safe Haven Baby Boxes in what she calls “the 10 largest cities near universities.”
College girls, ya know.!
That means somebody’s $160,000 (unless there’s a Groupon deal for big orders) will go to soothe the fantasy futures of Alabama’s wild and wayward coeds that Givens perceives are, garbage bag hand, running the streets of Mobile, Birmingham, Auburn Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, the Shoals area, Dothan, Baldwin County, the Gadsden/Anniston area, and Montgomery. Girl Scouts of North-Central Alabama in Oxford has been raising funds since 2021 for a box there, and apparently, they are left to their own devices, unless the Gadsden/Anniston area covers them.
Imagine how $160,000 could help mothers and children stay together. But addressing the real causes of the broken social system in the US today is too complicated or too “socialist” or something: institutional rot, rightwing politicians, poverty, lack of insurance, family policing, immigration status, domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, and family dysfunction. Give mothers boxes, not help!
Separate mothers and children to save them from each other! That’s the best they can come up with.
Addenda
As I was getting ready to post this blog I found an update on HB374 on the Kids to Love website. We’re a step closer to getting Safe Haven baby boxes for unwanted children in Alabama as well as a news story from WHNT-TV (Huntsville) featuring KTL. These have raised my curiosity and suspicions that I’ve not yhad the opportunity to investigate further.
In the middle of an otherwise routine news story on WHNT-TV about the bill’s passage:
Kids to Love say they worked hard to help make the bill a possibility. [CEO Lee] Marshall says the foundation has parents who are already willing to adopt babies who are surrendered.
We have so many families waiting to adopt those babies,” Marshall said. She added what she’s hoping to see long-term if the bill is signed into law.
“Long-term we are going to see so many more infants that are saved in our state, that are then placed into loving adoptive homes,” Marshall told News 19.
____________
ASIDE: Marshall was born in fostercare, adopted at age 2, and probably benefited from Alabama’s OBC access law
____________
There is nothing in HB374 to suggest that foster and adoption placement of safe havened and boxed babies would be handled by private child placing agencies. That is, the state would handle placement. The language, however, is also a bit vague.
(b) The department shall assume the care, control, and
legal custody of the child infant immediately on receipt of
notice pursuant to subsection (p.9)
Just what role do Kids to Love plan to play with the new law? Will the state channel its safe havened and boxed to it? Will it tip its clients and collect a finders fee from the state?
Perhaps a better bill reader than I can figure out how these babies will be divvyed out. Or maybe nobody will take the politicians and baby grubbers up on their offer to box their babies and they will sit lonely. Or maybe we will never know. Alabama is notoriously tight with Safe Haven law information. Hmm, maybe an email to Rep Givens or Lee Marshall is in order.
I have a couple of other questions about the new law, but those can wait.
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