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Holy Meow! And I mean Holy Happy Meow!
Seldom do we hear a discouraging word about Safe Haven Baby Boxes from outside of AdoptionLand. . Imagine my delight this afternoon when two –TWO–articles showed up in my Google Alerts shouting not only a discouraging word or two but entire paragraphs of discouragement at the God’s own Safe Haven Baby Box folks.
I will add the links to various pages on the SSHBBN site, but I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss this little crack in the wall.
The New Republic came through big time with Safe Haven “Baby Boxes” Are a Medieval Horror Show. The author of the piece is Italian-American journalist Maria Laurino, whose book The Price of Children will be published later this year in Italy. Laurino rips Italian and American adoption practices of sealed records, fictitious names, falsified documents, anonymous births–and baby boxes–placing them in the context of patriarchy, misogyny, and historic Catholic Church male privilege and protection… all in four print-out pages. Her article is surprisingly adoptee centric:
Adopted children in America and Italy describe how falsified documents and sealed birth records hid lifesaving medical information. Stripped of their birth identity—“I don’t remember signing up for the witness protection program,” one adoptee told me—they spent years on hopeless quests to find their birth mothers or to experience bittersweet late-in-life reunions. Using the tools of genetic genealogy, they desperately chase a ticking clock.
The classic baby box icon of the desperate mom-in-hoodie-babe-in-arms sneaking around at midnight to drop her secret baby into the secret box in the secret wall takes a nice tumble at the hands of Laurino, into the Dobbs sinkhole:
The terrified modern mother stripped of reproductive choices, depicted in safe haven literature hidden by a hoodie, sounds an alarm
as her medieval predecessor once rang a bell, alerting a fireman to take the infant to a social service agency.
Coming in second today: Are Baby Drop Boxes a realistic option for giving up newborn babies anonymously? an-op ed in the University of Dayton Flyer News. The author, Ren Sikes, finds safe laws necessary in a society that gives women with problematic pregnancies few tenable options but rejects the baby box “solution.”
If birth control and sex education were easily available in every state, if childcare was not as expensive or maybe, just maybe, women had the right to determine what they do with their own bodies, this would not be an issue.We don’t need more places to leave babies that are already born, and should instead focus on fixing the problem before it starts. Fix things so that we don’t have to worry about babies being abandoned.
I hope these two articles, published so close together and away from the AdoptionLand Choir are not an anomaly and that the incurious media is finally starting to take a look at what is going on–at the true horror show being played across the country by the Safe Haven Baby Box, Movement, its founders, funders, and agenda. and how it gus the rights of adopted people and their families.
If I can find contact information for Laurino and Sikes, I’ll drop them a line of thanks for running against the wind with us.
Love and solidarity,
Angelika, the Personal Assistant Cat
Angelika, the Personal Assistant Cat. Pushing back since 2022. She encourages comments and treats.
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