Dystopian San Antonio: Anonymously Dumping Your Baby in a Box-in-the-Wall Promotes Social Justice?

Last we heard from San Antonito, the dozen Safe Haven Baby Boxes authorized in 2023 to the tune of $430,000 in taxpayer money had yet to be delivered. According to the city’s lead abandonment box pusher Pamela Allen, director of the influential non-profit Eagles’ Flight Advocacy & Outreach, the City Attorney had dumped the boxes into their Limbo Box due to unspecified concerns with the proposed contract between SHBB Inc and the city (and our blog) Was that a nice way to say dispute? Officials in Goshen, Indiana raised objections about contract mandates and practices, so why shouldn’t SA?

Yesterday we got an update courtesy KAAB-TV. with Allen promising that boxes are on their way. The big problem, she says, was deciding which fire station locations to house them in. No mention of contract concerns. Nice switch out! While that is “interesting,” and typical of the baby box whitewash MO, the big, bizarre news is how Allen, Bexar County Sheriff, Javier Salazar, and Valerie Narvaez from Christian Assistance Ministry plan to inform the public and anyone passing through town, about SA’s personal and secret Dystopian baby abandonment option.

Thanks to her [Allen’s] working relationship with Sheriff Javier Salazar, posters will soon go up throughout the Women’s Detention Center and on buses and in other high-traffic areas. Plans are also underway for in-person classes.

Seriously! Can you imagine sitting in jail, pregnant, and being lectured on how to abandon your baby and why should do it? Will migrants waiting to be kicked out of the country momentarily be encouraged to box their “anchor babies” that Texas and US governments so abhor? One never knows in our Abbott-Paxton fiefdom. I love SA, but this Safe Haven Baby Box dump on the city is a huge personal disappointment.

Sheriff Salazar frames his enthusiasm as if anonymously dumping your baby in a box-in-the-wall is some sort of local social justice project:

“Addicted mothers, justice-involved mothers—at any given time, they’re passing through the Bexar County Jail,” he said. “Why not give them this information? Let them know there’s a safe option that could save their baby’s life.”

Valerie Narvaez made the weird suggestion that more psych wards are needed for women in crisis:

While they’re sitting up in Austin talking about billions in surplus, they need to put those dollars to work—get the Safe Haven boxes out, fund mental health resources, reopen psychiatric wards,” she said. “Our clients are falling through the cracks. Babies are suffering, but we can change that.”

We agree that women are falling through the cracks and that babies are suffering. We agree that genuine mental health resources need to be increased, (especially under the current state and federal regimes), but there are a lot better ways to serve women and children in Texas than baby abandonment boxes and McPsychWards,

How about well-funded public and private social services including medical and food resources? How about job training and jobs? How about free mothering classes? How about creating safe spaces for mothers and children? How about reproductive justice, not reproductive shame?

Have Allen, Salazar, and Narvaez looked at the 9 minute video posted by Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc that instructs teenagers how to conceal pregnancies from their parents (among others), ignore pregnancy complications, skip pre- and post-natal care, give uncomplicated birth alone (or in the case of the video inside a car with another teen assisting), then rush to a baby box in the middle of the night to get rid of the evidence, and rush back home by morning so nobody will know? That sounds like women falling through the cracks and babies suffering!

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Encouraging mothers to give away their babies–especially anonymously– compounds the problems that potential and current Box Mothers already face: poverty, isolation, domestic and intimate partner violence and abuse, depression family dysfunction, Draconian immigration policy and deportation threats, and perhaps substance abuse, mental and physical health problems? Boxing just sends then right back to the sinkhole.

And let’s not forget the engine that runs the Safe Haven Baby Box Movement: shame.

“Nobody will ever know” “No Blame, No Name. No Shame.

How does sneaking around, chucking a baby in a box, and walking away decrease the shame level? How does advocate portrayal of Box Moms as benevolent yet potential baby killers decrease the shame level? How does SHBB Inc and its sycophantic media message of “another baby was saved” decrease the shame level?

They don’t. because the Baby Box Movement does not acknowledge and address the very real causes of newborn discard and neonaticide and says it doesn’t have to.

Mrs. Kelsey, routinely says on social media that she and the movement are not political even if they are glued at the hip to the current political environment, and instruments of cultural misogyny in the US. It’s strange to listen to Mrs. Kelsey say that Dobbs, which she supports, would increase discard and claim she and her movement are not political. Especially strange-since she has been active in the anti-abortion movement for years and her “counselor” and hotline coordinator, Pam Stenzel, for at least 30 years has been a prominent anti-abortion activist who compares girls and women who have sex outside of marriage to an old shoe and a chewed piece of gum.

Is Mrs. Kelsey so ignorant or naïve of the conditions under which many women and children live that are directly linked to the political?

The mission of SHBB Inc is limited and we don’t expect that any time soon Mrs. Kelsey will drop her box campaign for SNAP or WIC or Medicaid advocacy (for example), but we do expect an acknowledgement that services on local, state, and federal levels are being dismantled and families thrown under the bulldozer for political “reasons.” It doesn’t take an economics genius to know that these services don’t turn a profit for the government or the rich.

The Safe Haven Baby Box Movement offers an easy alternative to the real political and social change work that. needs done. Instead, let’s go back to 1732, put the baby in a box, and walk away. Babies and moms and their problems are safely invisible.

Just think what San Antonio’s $430,000 could do to start to help mothers not exasperate their problem.

Written in 2 sessions of the London Writers Salon Writers Hour