The 2023 legislative season has been busy and brutal/ Twenty Safe Haven Baby Box bills were introduced. (+in many cases companion bills). Some were brand new bills to authorize baby box installation in their respective states and some were amendments to expand or clarify procedures for in-place safe haven and baby box laws
Indiana SB345: Bastard Nation’s Last letter of Opposition–In Hopeless Hope
Absolutely no adoptee rights or adoption reform organization in the United States today supports this unhealthy and unethical scheme that abrogates the rights of “legally abandoned” newborns, adoptees, and their biological parents and reeks of private industry privilege and profit. Yet our concerns go unanswered, and in fact ignored.
Texas SB780: Bastard Nation/SHBBN Letter of Opposition, Senate Health and Human Services Committee, March 7,2023
Safe Haven Baby Box proponents have played-down and ignored individual adoptee and adoptee rights opposition to them except to claim that we “hate adoption” which is simply not true…What we hate are deceptive relinquishment practices, rooted in shame and secrecy, that lead to drastic permanent solutions to temporary problems and a population of adoptees with no birth records, identity, or history
Indiana SB345: Bastard Nation Letter of Opposition– House Judiciary Committee, March 7, 2023. Legalizes child traffking for adoption
Moreover, the bill contains no requirement that the emergency provider even inform DCS of any type of Safe Haven event, hindering the state’s ability to regulate abandonment care procedures, oversee cases, and track abandonments and numbers. Lack of DCS involvement, in fact, reeks of black and gray market adoption outcomes and trafficking.
Safe Haven Baby Boxes Plays with Language: Now Boxed Babies are Refugees!
We learned yesterday, quite by accident, that baby boxers attempted to get a box bill through the Kansas legislature last session under an assumed name: Newborn Refuge Cribs. This term never came through in bill searches because until this bill came along no such term existed.
New Mexico: Politicians Want to Charge Taxpayers for Safe Haven Baby Boxes
New Mexico legislators play delirious to spend half a million dollars to maintain secret pregnancy, relinquishment, and adoption.
The Shame’s in Maine. Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now Law. And it Got Weird.
A compilation of some of the most weird-ass pro and con baby box testimony I’ve ever heard, all on Maine’s LD560.