Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc and Their Problem with The Devil

Last week Chiefland, Florida, got its very own Safe Haven Box, and Boy Howdy! the blessing celebration was weird– one of the weirdest we’ve seen in some time. The cameras were hardly rolling when a man in uniform, who I assume is the fire department chaplain, asked God to anoint the box and put a “hedge of protection on all those babies that will be put in this box.” (Marker: 12:05–start of video)

All those babies?

Currently 7 boxes live in Florida, and since they first arrived in 2020 there’s been only 1 catch. According to statistics maintained by the well-respected Florida trad organization, A Safe Haven for Newborns, only 3 newborns in that timeframe have been discarded in unsafe places. Outside of pluralizing the expected take, GodTalk is pretty standard baby box rhetoric, but…

…Chiefland’s vice mayor Lewissa Johns, juiced it up. Dressed in what we used to call pedal pushers (incidentally my favorite style of pant) she informed us that The Devil and his handiwork delayed the box opening for nearly 2 years. (Marker: 9:20)

…funds were raised within a week, so it wasn’t the funds. It was all those other roadblocks. I know it was the right thing to do. And if you are following what you are supposed to do, I know 100% that the Devil’s gonna come after you–he’s going to try to stop it and he did. Multiple times…

We are really curious about who The Devil went after and what roadblocks he threw up in Johns’ path.

This isn’t the first time The Devil has screwed with baby boxes. Monica Kelsey, Founder/CEO of SHBB Inc, in her memoir- cum adoption-is-God’s-plan apologia Blessed to Have Been Abandoned, devotes 2 chapters on her evil adversary–called The Storm– who apparently spent an inordinate amount of time in the early days of SHBB Inc messing with God’s proxy.

In Chapter 7: Here Comes the Storm, Mrs. Kelsey names The Devil’s crew of evil doers. Most are domiciled In Indiana: The Indiana Department of Children’s Services, The Indiana Health Department, The Indiana Commission on Improving the Status of Children, and The Indiana Task Force on Infant Mortality and Child Health. Added to that motley catalogue is The National Safe Haven Alliance, traditional Safe Haven law advocates in and outside of its membership–and Mike Morrisey founder of Baby Safe Haven New England. (OK, we’ll agree with her on that one).

State agencies plain didn’t like boxes and still don’t as far as we can tell, Officials first questioned and then attempted to stop the movement and its boxes cold in its tracks. Our main Indiana page has a collection of news stories and public record documents about the complicated fight.

The state got its nose swatted when Mrs Kelsey, who likes to pretend she’s just a down-home God-fearin’ Hoosier, hired a stable of lawyers to pursue her “vision.” The most prominent was Terre Haute-based James Bopp, Jr, whom you probably haven’t heard of, but is a Big Name. A Big Player in Biblical American and MAGA politics. He is so big that he is considered the architect of Citizens United.

Since 1978 Bopp has been the general counsel for National Right to Life.* But Bopp just isn’t a mouthpiece for RTL. His client portfolio includes, Focus on the Family, the Susan B Anthony List, Priests for Life, Traditional Values Coalition, Home School Legal Defense Fund, the Republican Partys of Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermon, and various MAGA luminaries such as Marjorie Taylor Green and Madison Cawhorne. Here’s his National RTL amicus in Dobbs. Here’s a press release about his amicus to SCOTUS for the James Madison Center for Free Speech t arguing that Trump did not engage in insurrection on January 6 and should be restored to the Colorado presidential ballot. If you have any doubt about the politics of SHBBI Inc..,.if it quacks like a duck…

Bopp took The Indiana Devil’s Disciples to the cleaners.

As for the trad Safe Haveners, according to Mrs Kelsey, they not only don’t like boxes, but they won’t let her play in their sandbox. Her application to NSHA was rejected years ago and it obviously stings. This rejection by the people she considers her natural allies forced Mrs. Kelsey to start her own “coalition” with a similar name, but whose members aren’t known, and we hear little about. She makes intermittent comments on social media that trads are jealous of her “” success” or they fear losing donations or grants to her.

Sadly, Mrs. Kelsey neglected to include the loudest complaints about baby abandonment boxes: Bastard Nation and the rest of the adoptee rights movement, birthparent rights groups, and adoption reform organizations to her list of Devil’s Disciples. Instead, she just ignores us since we ruin her happy- ever-after adoption narrative.

SHBB Inc’s hotline coordinator/counselor/development director/ board member and top-tier forced birth shill Pam Stenzel, who holds an MA in family counseling from Liberty University, however, refers to opposing adoptees as “mentally challenged.” Mrs. Stenzel has been known to compare young sexually active women to an old shoe or piece of chewed gum and that contraception can kill them. We can only wonder what she tells the “desperate women” who call the hotline.

Chapter 8: The Storm Comes Home is Mrs. Kelsey’s account on how early-on The Devil, attempted to thwart her work and created a family crisis to wipe baby boxes off the Indiana landscape.

Be assured of this, when you are fulfilling God’s call on your life, and you are making a difference, the enemy will always come after you. If he can’t get you to give up by using outside forces, he will most always change his tactics and hit you the hardest where it matters most. The ‘storm” will hit your family.

Mrs. Kelsey was forced to curtail much of her effort in 2016-2017 and perhaps beyond, when her son JJ was involved in a tragic roll-over that killed his best friend. Working as an EMT at the time she was called to the scene of the accident knowing that one person was dead and not knowing if JJ survived. The story includes the gross negligence of others not related to baby boxes and I won’t get into it here. JJ was charged on several counts but eventually was convicted on one count of causing a death while operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. He served 13 months in prison. I come from a background of prison reform/prisoner rights work, and IMO he got a really bad deal. Obviously, this whole situation put the skids on a lot of SHBB Inc plans.

That said, it’s hard to swallow that The Devil, in a fit of high dudgeon, decided to kill someone and send another to prison to put Mrs. Kelsey out of commission. The Devil was not poking his pitchfork in Mrs. Kelsey’s eye to divert her attention from God’s call. As the saying goes “shit happens” and that’s exactly what happened.

So now it’s time for us at SHBBN to fess up.

Being a lazy bunch, we hired The Devil to do our handiwork for us. He had a lot more resources and experience in troublemaking than we did. Since we have no money (unlike SHBB Inc) we offered him a Faustian deal of free space on this site where he could expound on baby boxes– when he’s not poking around in the White House, Moscow, Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza–about baby abandonment boxes. Unfortunately, The Devil was not the terrific ally we thought he’d be. He betrayed us (admittedly as The Devil tens to do). Mrs. Kelsey has obviously put him on her payroll (she can afford it nicely) and opened up opportunities for him that we could never offer. Now he’s doing SHBB Inc work. As of this writing, he’s let her open 31 boxes this year alone for a total of 334 nationwide.

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*Mrs. Kelsey insists that baby boxes have nothing to do with abortion, although her “pro-life bootcamp” and “sidewalk counseling” work predates SSHBB Inc. In fact, baby boxes grew out of a 2013 missionary” trip she and Mrs Stenzel took to South Africa, where she saw a box in a wall at a Capetown church.
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