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For years Missouri attempted to enact Safe Haven Baby Box legislation. A number of bills almost passed, but ran out of time and were sine died and started over the next session and the next. The bill got through unannounced when its language snuck into an appropriations bill, which has gotta pass or else… Mea culpa! I missed that one. It just didn’t show up in my searches. but once it takes that road, there is no turning back. Still, the state has been sitting boxless much longer than it rightly should have, judging from Missouri’s widely “conservative” political culture.
But the wait is over!
With much hoopla, cheers, horn-blowing-back-slapping politicians, and photo ops the first box –excuse me–newborn safety device–was “blessed” on August 8, at the Mehlville Fire Protection District Engine House No 2, in Oakwood (St. Louis County) Why, even Lt Governor Mike Kehoe showed up for the party. He gave a short spiel on abortion before breaking into full baby box gaga.
I’ve seen lots of box blessings online over the years Some small; some large; some turn into prayer meetings; some are interrupted by fire calls. They are all scripted. But I have never seen one that exuded such enthusiasm as Mehlville. You’d think Taylor Swift, not SHBBB Inc founder and CEO Monica Kelsey, and political bigwigs were at the mic.
One of the main speakers, of, course, was Rep Jim Murphy, (marker 4:15) who tap-danced the Missouri Safe Have Baby Box campaign through the legislature. He spoke of the struggle to get to this point–the installation hoo-haa.. He said the most incredible thing (marker 7:53)
The great part about this is there’s no human interaction with the idea of handing that baby over.
You’d think babies were swaddled in blankets soaked in hydrochloric acid or with bombs tied to their stomachs ! Calling 007!
Why not hang a pair of rubber gloves on a hook next to the box? How about developing a technology where a robotic arm reaches out and removes the baby from the pre-murder clutches of its “desperate mother” (assumption: it’s always her, not a pissed-off father or grandparent.) That could make the separation of mother and child as mechanized and inhumane and cartoonish as it “should be” if you listen to the propaganda of the pushers, and Mrs Kelsey’s handy-dandy YouTube/TikTok lessons that teach mothers how to do a 30-second dump and run with no regrets, shame, or bloody underwear.
No one, after all, should be ashamed about abandoning their child. Mrs. Kelsey, in fact, is adamant that boxing is not abandoning. It’s about an invisible mother placing a sanitized baby into a locked box and then into the loving arms of a stranger forever family–even while she and the Murphys of this country celebrate literal faceless, touchless anonymous baby switchouts.
Untouched by human hands.
Just like new!
Do these people ever listen to themselves?
They sure don’t listen to adoptees.
I don’t want to be mean, but I hope these celebrations of pre-planned family loss, are archived and available to these babies when they grow up so they will see just how commodified they were and how their vulnerable mothers (and sometimes fathers) were manipulated into this family and personal tragedy that never ends. Their therapists will appreciate it.
Mrs. Kelsey likes to say that baby boxing is the same as closed adoption. Excuse me! A closed adoption includes counseling, signed paperwork, family histories, original birth certificates, court records, and other documentation. that someday might be available to the adoptee. All The Boxed get is a thought, a prayer, and a platitude:
Your brave mother loved you so much she didn’t murder you.
That “extra layer of anonymity” creates an extra layer of mindfuck for adoptees to dig and scrape through their entire lives. (Special shovels available for bureaucratic bullshit.) It gives a whole new and deeper meaning to abandonment issues.
Is this something to celebrate?
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