Information about this website, its purpose, and its publisher and owner.
What is the mission of Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now?
Stop Baby Boxes Now (SSHBBN) is a non-partisan website that serves as an educational resource and tool to de-propagandize and deconstruct the Safe Haven Baby Box (SHBB) movement and myth. Our goal is to expose how the Safe Haven Baby Box movement is an unethical agendized movement that undermines adoptee, parental, and tribal civil and human rights; rejects best practice standards in child welfare, adoption, fostercare, pre-, and post-natal care; opposes family preservation; and harms children and their families. Our resources encourage critical thinking and assist individuals and organizations to actively oppose legislation and other methods to implement and advocate SHBB use on the local state, and national levels.
What is on this site?
The SSHBBN website contains up-to-date legislative tracking, action alerts, individual state updates, information, and statistics, policy statements from organizations that oppose SHBB, critical readings and reports, pictorials, and videos. It features a frequently published blog of news and opinion written from various oppositional viewpoints.
Who is the audience of the SSBBN website?
The public at large. We are especially interested in attracting adoptee rights and adoption reform activists and organizations, child welfare advocates, social justice and legal researchers and advocates, writers, academics, policymakers, legislators, and the media. Over the last 6 years, media representation of the SHBB movement has been biased and one-sided giving lip service (if that) to criticism. We have seen an avalanche of feel-good news stores with little research and substance on the efficacy, ethics, and morality of Safe Haven Baby Boxes. These “reports” fail to discuss how boxes fail to address the causes of newborn discard much less individual cases and outcomes of baby box use for child and mother. An incurious media with a tiny exception regurgitates what SHBB movement promoters dictate to them.
Is Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now! an organization?
No. We are a loose network of unaffiliated organizations and individuals with diverse and even opposing views on the implementation of traditional Safe Haven laws. We have no formal structure. We are not a coalition, but we hold to the coalition standard of mutual aid and support in opposing SHBB implementation while maintaining our long-held pro and con policies on traditional Safe Haven laws. Our common denominator is our opposition to Safe Haven Baby Boxes in the US and elsewhere.
Who opposes the SHBB movement?
Adoptee rights/adoption reform organizations such as Bastard Nation, the Adoptee Rights Law Center, Adoptees United, and various state adoptee rights organizations; charities/non-profits in various states, as well as adoption professionals and adoption agencies. Additionally, the National Safe Haven Alliance (NSHA ) stresses traditional Safe Haven use above boxes, and some individual alliance members and allies, such as The Save Abandoned Babies Foundation (Illinois), AMT-Children of Hope (New York), and A Safe Haven for Newborns (Florida) actively oppose SHBB legislation. Ironically, politicians and policymakers who were quick to support Safe Haven advocates 20 years ago when Safe Haven laws were legislated now reject Safe Haven leader opposition testimony and in some cases treat their former friends as poorly as they did adoptee rights advocates and others who opposed Safe Haven legislation in the past. As usual adoptee objections aren’t even a blip on the baby box radar. (See Friends & Allies for policy statements)
What about your opposing views on traditional Safe Haven laws?
Those who oppose the SHBB movement disagree among themselves on the efficacy and use of traditional Safe Haven laws, often vocally and publicly. We agree, however, that Safe Haven Baby Boxes should not be legalized or used. We believe collectively that baby boxes set a dangerous, reactionary, and archaic precedent. We believe that Safe Haven Baby Boxes should not be “just another choice” for parents to abandon “inconvenient newborns.” Some of our objections overlap. Some agree. Some disagree. Don’t be surprised then, if organizational objections specific to the SHBB movement are at odds with our larger missions and are presented on the site.
How does the SHBB movement react to criticism?
Adoptee opponents are pointedly ignored for the most part. If advocates do acknowledge adoptee dissent, SHBB Inc attempts to silence them by accusing adopted people of “hating adoption.” especially “closed adoption”–as if closed adoption and baby boxing are the same things. They are badgered: “Would you rather have been aborted?” and “Do you want dead babies in dumpsters?” Moreover, adoptee opponents are labeled “bitter,” “angry,” “ungrateful,” and “unhappy” They are ordered to “go get therapy!” Traditional Safe Haven advocates and organizations, some of whom pioneered Safe Haven laws nationwide, are portrayed as “out of touch,” “uninformed,” ”uneducated” and “jealous.” They are accused of being afraid of losing public or private funding and “wanting more dead babies.” SHBB Inc implies that both groups along with anyone else who opposes sticking babies in walls of being “pro-abortion shills.
Does SSHBBN oppose adoption?
SSHBBN takes no position on adoption. We support adoptee truth, and adoptee. rights. We oppose any law or practice that denies adopted people their civil and human rights to their birth, court, and other identity records
Who operates the SSHBBN website?
Marley Greiner, who is in part the Executive Chair of Bastard Nation: the Adoptee Rights Organization. The site, however, is not affiliated with Bastard Nation or any other organization, though the adoptee rights criticism of SHBB is rooted in BN policy and work. Read more about Marley.