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On December 4, 2020, Gary, Indiana Fire Station # 5 became the 48th location in the state to open a Safe Haven Baby Box where mothers (though fathers and others are not exempt from participation) can legally abandon their secret newborns by depositing them in a box-in-a-wall to prevent personal inconvenience, embarrassment, and shame.
The Gary Baby Box blessing featured several really stupid bits from advocates reported later in the NW Times. Unfortunately, this blessing wasn’t recorded and posted on Facebook like most are, so I have to take the word of reporter Steve Euvino, who covered the event. In his excitement, Mr.Uuvino could hardly keep his pants on over the approved-by-politicians-and preachers method of baby abandonment with no consequences.
The article opened with the memorable line:
In what is seen as a real bonus for mothers and families, the 52nd Safe Haven Baby Box nationally is now in operation.
To be kind, Mr. Euvino, who I bet is not adopted, might have been caught up in the moment. To not be unkind, he just might be conveniently ignorant. He failed to acknowledge that legal baby dumping is built on loss and tragedy for babies, their biological mothers, fathers, and extended family members. Boxing, he failed to acknowledge, is the erasure of individual identities, histories, and relationships. Box use, he failed to acknowledge, is an endorsement of discredited “clean slate” closed and secret adoption theory-into-practice that taught generations that Class Bastard has no history before adoption#; that we would all be fine with this unless we were neurotic, psychotic, selfish, or otherwise disturbed. This fuckery condemned millions of members of Class Bastard to anonymity, disenfranchisement, confusion, shame, and for many anger depression, therapy, expensive searches, self-harm, and even suicide. I can only assume then that Mr. Euvino aimed his comments, at the mothers and the new families these dumped babies will acquire adoptively on the backs of disempowered bios.
This kind of Baby Box drivel gives new meaning to the traditional Safe Haven slogan “No Shame, No Blame, No Name,” a slogan guaranteed to make adoptees feel lousy about themselves while exonerating parents from guilt over what has been universally condemned throughout history: baby abandonment.
The SHBB team has been especially keen on erasing the stigma from parents who abandon their babies via Baby Box love through rhetorical gymnastics, claiming boxing it is not abandonment at all since babies aren’t left in a dumpster or in the woods. If so, then why do adoptees universally suffer from abandonment issues, even in the best adoptions, no matter how they were “relinquished?” Here’s a good essay on “she-loved-you- so-much” mind fuck, a stupid idea that makes no sense except to those who aren’t adopted and routinely gaze at rainbows looking for unicorns.
Gary Fire Department Chaplain Thaddeus, Brown is next, sending up an enthusiastic prayer calling the boxes
a beacon of hope
Again for whom? The desperate and childless?
Monica Kelsey, founder and CEO of SHBB unable to attend the blessing due to a family emergency, issued a press release touting baby boxes as a consumer decision.
Safe Haven Boxes works hard to ensure that every parent knows all their options including Safe Haven surrender.
SHBB program director Channel Cunningham, who was present, tag-teamed Kelsey with:
Through these baby boxes…the program is raising awareness of current laws and providing anonymous options for women and other people who need to surrender their infants.
Other people?
Coke or Pepsi? Home Depot or Lowe’s? Cats or dogs? Christmas turkey or ham? I’m also betting that abortion would never be considered an option since boxes are being hawked as a solution for “desperate women” if and when Roe is overturned. Heroes, as Team SHBB calls them, who “carry to term” and then stuff the baby into a nearby box for quick EMT pickup.
Now comes Gary mayor Jerome Prince:
...speaking as the father of four and grandfather of 11, said he and his wife were able to provide for their family, adding “but there are a number of people who do not have the ability to do that.
Prince almost sounds eugenics-minded . At best he’s channeling the abominable Elizabeth Love-Me-I’m-a-NeoLib Bartholet out of Harvard Law, who thinks that the poor, racial and ethnic “minorities,” and entire exploited countries owe it to their children to ship them out to faraway places with strange-sounding names not only for their children’s own good but for their families and even their country’s improvement. The raw colonization of the bodies of children. It’s the patriotic thing to do. If this is the case, the US needs to send its excess babies off, especially when Roe goes away as they pray it will, to good and Godly homes in Romania, India, and Congo.
Baby boxing, for Prince, then, is an alternative parenting decision that the poor should consider over baby-keeping. Forget about tax-sucking benefits such as food stamps, WIC, public housing, and other forms of public and private assistance including non-directive ethical counseling that lets families, especially headed by single mothers (baby boxers’ main market target) to stay in tact–or at least act ethically with a legal and informed adoption plan. Whatever! Baby boxing is adoption on steroids: a permanent solution to a temporary problem that indelibly severs identity, roots and families in ways that even closed adoptions don’t.
Prince’s statement is about as clueless and stupid as some of the things that California pols declared 15 years ago when they tried unsuccessfully three times to increase the age that babies could be “surrendered” under the state’s traditional safe haven law. My favorite argument out of their mouths, was the trial drive argument positing that anonymous abandonment of older babies is necessary since new parents didn’t sign up for fussy babies and sleep-deprived nights and need a month or so to decide if they can hack it. These arguments were so stupid that the increase was opposed by individual California safe haven advocates and organizations, district attorneys, the LA County Board of Supervisors, California Right to Life, numerous child welfare organizations, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who vetoed the bills three times before these crackpots gave up.
Finally, we have Joan McClusky, whose (unidentified) company sponsored the Baby Box in Hammond.
It’s important for mothers to be able to give their baby up anonymously and know it will be taken care of.
I am continually baffled by the confusion and cognitive dissonance of Baby Box advocates like Ms McClusky who argue that their social project “saves babies lives;” then turn around declaring that mothers who utilize boxes love their babies so much that they are hiding them in a box and giving them away anonymously to strangers to save them. From what and who? Themselves? That’s never explained. There’s just some kind of dark cloud hovering overhead—an abstracted moral panic of what somebody might do. There is nothing that baby boxers love more than speculative law to push their agenda.
These “saving” messages are prevalent in every baby box blessing and news story on the market.. They all came, together, however, in Monica Kelsey’s press conference at the Decatur Township Fire Station #74 on October 13, 2020, during the celebration for a boxing there a few days earlier, where she references a traditional safe haven ‘relinquishment “that occurred at the fire station before the box was installed. Kelsey said (Transcribed by Otter)
- It’s not that these women don’t love their babies. This woman left a note with her child, and it’s heartbreaking just to read it because she expressed how much she loved this child. And so, thank this fire department for having this resource available
- But thankfully this option is available for them because where would this baby have been found? We don’t know if this baby would have been placed in a safe place. It might have been found dead. We don’t know. I can tell you this. By reading this letter that she left, this mother loved her child. And it is evident by the letter that she wrote.
- [The letter] I hope that this child reads this letter in 18 years and says my birthmom did everything possible to keep me safe, and loved me so much so that much that she saved my life, and utilized a law that was made for her.. You know, we never know these women’s circumstances but what we do know one thing for sure and that they all have in common. That’s the love for their child.
Am I being dim here? What does this mean? I love my baby so much that if I can’t disappear it, I’ll murder it?
That the media never notices these contradictions is a mystery to me, and can only be marked up as an inability to question “baby saving” methodology and underlying agendas. Ron Morgan told me years ago during the safe haven debate in the California legislature that lawmakers told him the measure was the most cynical bill they’d ever seen, but held their nose and voted it into law. Nobody wants to be perceived as promoting “baby killing” even if no babies are ever in danger. legislative blackmail. And that’s the fear that fuels these laws.
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#Linda Znachko, SHBB associate and founding president of He Knows Your Name, a baby burying minister, speaks at most box blessings. She refers to the day a baby is placed in a box as its birthday.
Originally posted in The Daily Bastardette on December 16, 2020.
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