California AB2073: Bastard Nation/SHBBN Joint Testimony–Assembly Public Safety and Judiciary Committees. Opposed

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

AB2073
Infant Safety Devices/Safe Haven Baby Box Authorization

California Assembly Public Safety Committee

California Assembly Judiciary Committee

Submitted March 16, 2026

OPPOSE

Submitted Testimony 
by
Marley E. Greiner, Executive Chair. Bastard Nation

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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 Bastard Nation, 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 other adoption documents. Since 2016 we have opposed the legalization and use of “newborn safety devices” aka Safe Haven Baby Boxes I am also the owner of Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now, the largest baby abandonment box information, education, and media resource website in the world.

We are not alone in opposition. No adoptee rights, birthparent rights, or adoption reform organization in the US today supports newborn safety devices. Neither do the pioneers of the original Safe Haven Law movement, such as A Safe Haven for Newborns (Miami), the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation (Chicago), and AMT-Children of Hope (New York). I have not seen that the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys (Quad A) ) has an official opposition policy, but its Florida affiiate, the Florida Adoption Council, does. Other prominent organiztions that oppose include, but are not limited to, the Chicago Bar Association, the ACLU of Maine and New Mexico, the Louisiana Partnership for Children and Famiies, the Lousiana March of Dimes, the Society for Adoption Truth, the national family-preservation organization Saving Our Sisters, and the Coalition to Prevent Violence Against Native Women (New Mexico). A complete list is here (www.stopshbbnow.org/our-friends). Safe Haven Baby Boxes are in direct confict with the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and similar native and indigineous state protection laws, which in some states are stronger than ICWA. Baby Box legislation in New Mexico has been defeated repeatedly due to the opposition of tribal leaders and Native American legal advocates. The current California Safe Haven law does does not provide ICWA or other indigenous protections, and the enactment of AB2073 will increase the danger to native rights and sovreigity.

Last last year, the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University’s Infant Abandonment Working Group published Legislative Report: US Policy Responses to Infant Abandonment and Infanticide (www.bioethics.yale.edu/infan_ abandonment)) The Center also sent an open letter to HSS supported by over 100 child welfare and maternal health scholars, clinicians, legislators, policymakers, educators, adoption and birthparent 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 federal oversight of the rapidly expanding network of unregulated Safe Haven Baby Boxes. (These documents and more are available at the general working group link above.)

Our submitted testimony contains 3 parts:

A general narrative of our opposition. To make this testimony easier for all of us, this is followed by two attached bullet point fact sheets which go into more detail:

• Document A: Our Talking Points, an easy to-follow sheet covering objections regarding the abrogation of adoptee civil rights, birthparent rights, informed consent, and best practice in adoption and child welfare that the legalization of baby abandonment boxes present.
• Document B: 4 Specific concerns about procedures, practices safety and ultimately the tight control practiced by the only source of abandonment boxes in the US: Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc, the ministry that created the Safe Haven Baby Box Movement, manufactures and distributes the boxes, directly or indirectly “writes” legislation such as AB2073, runs a hotline to channel mothers to boxes, raises funds, and uses Box Babies as tools to further its agenda.

The Adoptee Rights Movement Opposes Newborn Safety Device /Baby Boxes:

Why it’s Important

The promotion and use of Safe Haven Baby Boxes is anti-adoptee, anti-adoption, anti-family, dangerous, and unethical. Boxes are a danger to the physical and mental/emotional health of mother and child. Abandonment boxes are a slap in the face of every parent who has followed normal child relinquishment procedures. The boxes are a slap in the face of the 6 million adopted people in the United States today, who as in California, are subjected to archaic and discriminatory adoption secrecy laws such as sealed birth and court records. The promotion of baby boxes promulgates he secret system that adopted people have battled for over 70 years to abolish.

Safe Haven Baby Box promoters, no matter how well-intentioned (and most are), whether they know it or not, subscribe, 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 infants’ legal and psychological welfare and civil rights or those of their biological parents.

Instead, Baby Boxes are promoted as a consumerist “choice”– a simple solution for mothers so “desperate” that unless they can dump their newborns anonymously in a box-in-a-wall they will kill or at least discard them dangerously. These same “dangerous” mothers portrayed as the raison d’etre for baby boxes—these Monster Moms–when they use the box, however, are re-framed, redeemed, and praised by proponents for loving their babies so much they can’t bring themselves to kill them. The Safe Haven Baby Box Movement with its boxes, in hand, in reality, are profoundly misogynistic presenting all girls and women of child-bearing age as potential neonaticists.

Who and what are these babies “saved” from?

When asked to provide evidence of the efficacy of Safe Haven Baby Boxes, who uses them, and why, advocates can cite no studies or any other facts because none exist nor can they exist due to the secrecy that surrounds the cases. We have only their intuitive “we just know.”

There is no newborn discard epidemic in the US today. The number of reported discard cases throughout the US has remained steady—a little over 30 a year– since the Safe Haven Baby Box concept was introduced 10 years ago. According to the CDHSS Office of Child Abuse Prevention, (www.cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/ocap/safely-surrendered-baby/data) dangerous discards in California plummeted from 20 in 2001 (7 surviving and 13 deceased) to 3 in 2024. (1 surviving and 2 deceased, making the discard rate in the state, one of the lowest in the country. Last year’s statistics have not been posted yet

The only thing baby abandonment boxes have accomplished is making it easier for a small number of parents to do drive-by child relinquishment without informed consent, non-directed counseling, and pesky paper-signing.

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Safe Haven Baby Box advocates claim that traditional Safe Haven laws, with their anonymous personal hand-off “relinquishment” provisions, are tricky and dangerous. “Women demand anonymity” leading proponents insist–granted total anonymity in child relinquishment, in order to be protected from shame and guilt. But what says more about shame and guilt than promoting a program where women are taught (the baby box company offers a training video–see Document 2 for link) how to hide pregnancy and childbirth, skip pre-and post- natal care, and encouraged to skulk around dark obscure (but “prominent”) spots outside of hospitals and fire or police stations to drop their babies into a box, like trash, and walk away. “No one will ever have to know” But people will know!

Under AB2073, babies up to 3 days of age can be dropped off at state-designated locations such as hospitals and fire stations or just left in a box. These babies potentially have known identities parent(s), families, medical providers, social connections, birth certificates, Social Security cards, and any number of other ties to their families and communities. With passage of AB2073, they will be unceremoniously disappeared inside a box. And no one will ask “Where’s the baby?”???? Seriously!

This personal hand-off practice that occurs currently in California offers but does not force interventions: crisis counseling services, support, family preservation options. In other words, decompression and reconsideration. Traditional safe haven advocates, in fact, report that about 30% of mothers who initially plan to use their state’s safe haven law, change their minds and retain custody, transfer custody to a family member, or place their babies in open adoptions. According to the Office of Child Abuse Prevention see above link) 65 babies have reclaimed by their parents.

The secret Safe Haven Baby Box procedure makes retrieval nearly impossible.

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Baby Box proponents say often that they don’t care what causes mothers to discard their newborns—or why they use a box. They just want them to use them; thus, irresponsibly ignoring the complex and messy causes of infant discard:

• poverty
• inability to secure affordable medical treatment and reproductive health care; decrease in reproductive rights. Cuts in Medicaid and ACA has made it difficult if not impossible for some California mothers and babies to access obstetrical and maternity care. According to a 2024 article in CalMatters,since 2012 56 hospitals in the state, (16% of all acute care hospitals in California had stopped delivering babies. (www.calmatters.org/health/2024/09/new-maternity-care-closures)-
• 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.

Although no study of Safe Haven Baby Boxes use has been made, since 2002 the (Los Angeles County) Inter-Agency Council on Child Abandonment and Neglect ICAN) has published annual reports on the use of the state’s “Safe Surrender” law. Each are available online separately, and the latest report (2022-2023) offers short summaries for each year. While information on every case is not available, those cases which have been documented indicate that the chief causes of SH law use is poverty/inability to secure health and social services, and substance abuse. Many mothers have older children and cannot afford to care for another. How do baby abandonment boxes help these mothers?

Safe Haven Baby Boxes do not even act as a band-aid for what is going on—especially under the current drastic cutback of social services and disregard for civil and human rights.

Events leading to the relinquishment of a child by any means is not the first crisis in a mother’s life. Ultimately, how does sticking a baby in a box anonymously and walking away arrest that crisis and improve the lives of girls and women subjected to domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking, poverty, substance abuse, lack of health care services and counseling, or suffering from the social and economic disconnect and dysfunction rampant in the US today? Add the overriding personal shame embedded in this Devil’s mix, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster stamped with the promotion and approval of the state and special interests.

What is needed are programs that serve women and children and families in crisis, not endorse and legalize programs that sever familial relationships, create a permanent “solution ” to a temporary problem, and abrogate the civil rights of babies, the adults they will become, and their parents. Safe Haven Baby Boxes is not one of those programs.

Please Vote DO NOT PASS on AB2073. Thank you!

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DOCUMENT A

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.

Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!

6537 S. Staples Street, Ste 125, Corpus Christi Texas 78413
(614) 795-6819
stopshbbnow.org

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Document B

Safe Haven Baby Boxes: Concerns Beyond Adoption and Child Welfare Practices. Monopoly Control, Policy/ Procedures, Funding/Cost, Safety/Health/ Welfare/ Regulation

Monopoly Control

Bills to legalize the use of Safe Haven Baby Boxes are vendor bills that benefit one company, Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc in Woodburn, Indiana, a multi-million-dollar ministry that is the only source of the devices in the US. The company invented the Baby Box Movement and market it, writes bills and lobbies lawmakers, produces baby boxes at its own factory, installs the devices, trains location staff, runs a hotline that refers pregnant women and new mothers to box locations near them, and holds press conferences when a newborn is left in a box. Rather than protect legitimate privacy interests of Box Babies, it uses boxed children as fundraising tools for its ministry.

Box Operation, Policy, and Practices

The signage on and around Safe Haven Baby Box locations serves as an advertisement for Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc. Some locations reportedly attempt to include their own signage that would direct parents to consider a traditional personal walk-in hand-over or other related services, which the company denies. Some locations reportedly ask to include literature on local medical, legal, and other support resources available to baby box users, which again the company denies.

Instead, SHBB Inc offers their own information packet in an orange bag found inside the box. From what we have observed in SHBB Inc online posts, news stories, and in legislative and committee meetings, the packet contains advertising about the company along with minimal and possibly wrong medical and legal information. A box located in the Cincinnati-area referred mothers to a midwife in Fort Wayne, Indiana, approximately 180 miles away. The box in Norwalk, Iowa, refers them to a medical service in St. Louis 350 miles away. The information sheet on post-natal care (also online in FAQ form) is minimal and unprofessional. The Ohio Health Review Board considers the bag, “debris” as per state law, and banned the orange bag from the device, suggesting that it could be placed in a container or rack next to the box. The board also ordered the company to include Ohio Department of Health and Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services literature regarding state services and other information (we are not sure what) in the orange bag, but have no idea if the the company complied.

SHBB locations are required to inform SHBB Inc within 2 hours of a drop-off; then prohibited from announcing the case publicly until the company shapes an official announcement that appears in news and social media .In 2025, a fire station in Alabama was taken to task by SHBB Inc social media when the local newspaper reported a drop-off before the company issued an “official” statement.

Finally, SHBB Inc runs its own private “family registry.” The company’s low info orange bag includes a printed form that parents can fill out at the time of drop-off or submit any time later to the company to record health and social histories—and even include parent identities. This form compares poorly to the professionally designed detailed voluntary medical and social history forms available to parents through state agencies across the country at traditional Safe Haven locations. The SHBB Inc form is held “anonymous” and as far as we know, is not available to appropriate state agencies or child placing agencies appointed by the state to administer custody, care, and baby placement, Nor, as far as we know, is this information given to the adoptive parents of Box Babies. The company for its own unknown purposes, seems to squirrel away personal and “private” information about babies and parents that in normal adoptions would most likely be shared and the adopted individuals could later obtain.

Funding and Cost of Safe Haven Baby Boxes

SHBB Inc sells it product and service to lawmakers and the public claiming the acquisition/lease of a box is a voluntary, local initiative funded not by public funds but by voluntary donations from individuals, ministries, churches, businesses, fraternal organizations, non-profits, anti-abortion organizations, and foundations. Original SHBB legislation usually does not include state funding, but over the last few years some states have amended their laws to add taxpayer funding. Some cities have taken money from COVID, Homeland Security, and other special government accounts.

SHBB Inc initially operated on these private donations, and still collects them. but through various 990s posted online we have documented over $2 million in state and local taxpayer funded allocations for boxes (there is probably more) for a “service” that is publicized free of public funding and paid for by voluntary contributions. The company does not publicize these taxpayer funds and insists that does not take any.

Representative tax payer direct funding or through grants include, but not limited to: Indiana ($1,000,000); Arkansas ($230,000) Alabama ($20,000). Montana ($160,000), Cold Lake, Florida ($25,000), Beech Grove, Indiana ($19,000) Helena, Montana ($15,000), Big River, Montana ($15,000). New Mexico, with no box law on the books, allocated $330,000.

San Antonio, Texas, allocated nearly $450,000 for 12 boxes (reduced to 10) that remain uninstalled due to the City Attorney’s unspecified concerns about SHBB Inc’s proposed contract with the city.

Trustees at Union Township, Ohio, outside of Cincinnati, decided it was OK to pay outright the approximate $16,000 lease fee and other costs in their entirety with taxpayer money, not donations. When local pro-life conservative political watchdog Chris Hicks visited the fire station, to see what the box was about, he found the facility empty with a working box in its wall. He continued his investigation, chronicling it on Facebook and YouTube. The the over-spending trustees dug in and hired an extra firefighter to babysit the facility and keep the box running. SHBB Inc promised to fund the new firefighter but did not. (See video, courtesy of Chris Hicks.) Thus, local taxpayers were dunned not only the cost of the box but for an extra full-time firefighter at union scale with benefits Hicks reported his findings (which included other violations of Ohio law regarding maintenance and sanitation) to the Ohio Public Health Review Board. His documented report led to the Ohio Department of Health shutting down out-of-compliance boxes until problems were fixed. (See below for more safety issues.

Safety, Health, and Welfare of Mother and Child

Promotion and the availability of baby abandonment boxes discourages women from seeking pre-and post-natal care. Instead, SHBB Inc facilitates those in “crisis pregnancies” to undergo dangerous and unsafe unattended births and care outside of a medical and safe setting.

Unsafe Pregnancy and Birth Practices: SHBB Inc says that it suggests its callers seek medical and counseling services, pre- and postnatal care, safe delivery, financial assistance, etc, but its 9 minute video (deceptively called a Public Service Announcement) with over 28K views on its YouTube channel, is a step-by-step guide, targeting teenage girls, on how to keep pregnancy, childbirth, and “relinquishment-by-box” concealed–a secret. The video panders the weird idea that secret pregnancy, is physically and emotionally easy to pull off, and that unattended childbirth is pristine, uncomplicated and safe. We have shown this video to professionals in OB care and child welfare, and they have been horrified by this message. Those who follow the guidance of the video could die. Their babies could die.

According to SHBB Inc, the youngest mother they have guided anonymously to the box was 12. Would you want your 12-year old daughter or granddaughter, or sister, or neighbor to follow this message?

This is the link to the video.

Health of Box Babies and Mothers: Advocates and news reports routinely claim that babies left in boxes are “healthy and well cared for,”contradicting their “fact” that their mothers would not care for them and might have killed them without the box option. We know, however, of 4 cases (very possibly more) where babies were announced “healthy” but weren’t; and another case where a deceased newborn was dropped off.

• April 2022: a baby girl boxed in Hammond, Indiana, had a stroke either during or shortly after birth and reportedly may suffer lifelong neurological problems.
• May 2023: a newborn boy was boxed in Benton, Arkansas and pronounced “healthy” though transferred to hospice 1 month after birth diagnosed with pseudo-Zellwegers (D-bi functional protein deficiency), other serious medical issues, and suffered 30-40 seizures a day. He died at 11 months of age.
• February 2024 a newborn boy boxed in  Belen, New Mexico was immediately admitted to the local neonnate ICU suffering from pneumonia and hypothermia, and was hospitalized for a month.
• October 2024: a deceased newborn was left in a box in Blackfoot, Idaho. The mother was located and eventually sentenced to 10 years probation and 100 hours of community service. Moreover, in February 2024, SHBB Inc announced on TikTok that one of its Box Mothers OD’d and died shortly after boxing her baby–a suspected suicide. (The video seems to have been taken down but here is what we wrote about it)

Safe Haven Boxes are Unregulated

The USDA does not consider SHBBs to be medical devices, Furthermore, they are not tested by Underwriters Laboratory; thus, not UL certified.

According to the Quality Inspection.org website, equipment that should have UL certification includes (1) Electrical and electronic equipment (appliances, power supplies, etc.) and (2) Alarm signaling devices (smoke detectors, fire suppression and alarm monitoring).This means that your microwave, TV, nightstand lamp, and even your power cords should be UL compliant, but electrically- operated baby boxes, that contain a multiple alarm system, are not.

Importantly, manufacturers of electrical devices that are not certified and 3rd parties that utilize them—in the case of Safe Haven Baby Boxes, the state, locations and municipalities that authorize their use–could be held liable for death, personal injuries, or property damage caused by non-complaint devices.

Last year the SHBB Inc CEO said that getting UL certification is expensive and they have been working on getting it for 2 years. According to the Quality Inspection site, “A small and simple product could cost between $2-5k, requiring several samples per test, and take about 3-4 weeks to complete the testing.” More complex products can cost more $50k and take over a month. SHBB Inc’s published 990s indicate the company can well afford certification even for high-end testing. Their 2024 990 (November 11, 2025) indicates an income of over $4.5 million.

Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now!

6537 S. Staples Street, Ste 125, Corpus Christi Texas 78413
(614) 795-6819
stopshbbnow.org

Revised March 16, 2026