by 
Monica Kelsey, founder and CEO of Safe Haven Baby Boxes Inc., went on TikTok to announce that the anonymous biological mother of one of her boxed babies has died of an overdose.
This mother needed real help.
Not a baby box.
Not an amateur untrained “friend” to “walk beside her in her journey.”
Not a bogus hotline counselor with “degrees” from Moody Bible Institute and Liberty University who publicly compares women who have sex without a husband to a “chewed piece of gum.”
We have warned for years of the physical and psychological danger of anonymous boxing to mother and child. Now it’s come home. Mrs. Kelsey has no idea what she is playing with and will take no responsibility. A bunch of do-gooder amateurs are dabbling with real-life people, with real-life problems that thoughts and prayers and a baby abandonment box can’t solve.
We don’t know the mother’s circumstances, but would the outcome have been different if she had received genuine help through reputable services or even walked into a fire station or ER and done a traditional face-to-face safe haven handover with the opportunity to talk to someone trained to help her? The metal click of the baby box lock is not the sound of kindness and compassion. It is not a “birthday party waiting to happen, as SHBB Inc associate Linda Znachko likes to say. It is the sound of despair.
Now we get a nameless mother whose nameless child will never have a chance to know her (or even be told about her? ) Or will they be told that your mother loved you so much she dropped you off in Mrs. Kelsey’s abandonment box and then OD’d herself?
This death goes beyond sadness. Our adoption landscape is strewn with the bodies of anonymous and dead mothers and children. Instead of answers, compassion, and justice, we get sealed records, legal and judicial lies and silence, and online memorial walls. What a burden of grief for this child–this adoptee–and their mother. For all of us. No blame, No shame, No name. Just another OD.
I am only posting a link to the TikTok post, not the TT itself since, honestly, I don’t feel like looking at Mrs. Kelsey’s sad face with its forlorn discourse—and maybe you don’t either.
Rest in peace. Rest in power. Eternal memory.
This is why we continue to fight.
Thank you for all you do. People need to realize they’re not saving any babies. They are just allowing the parents to have no responsibility towards the child. A child can be safely surrendered with information that is needed for medical and identity to a hospital or a fire station. a child surrendered in a baby box will be left with no information.
I don’t know whether to cry for the victims (mother and child) or scream in rage at what these baby boxes are doing!
One of the more annoying reactions I’ve seen from the SHBB Inc crew was a comment on FB. This is paraphrased, but it went like this: “The mother knew what would happen (the OD or close to it) so she boxed her baby.” It got a gazillion likes. I know I’m not telling you anything new, but this whole “movement” is supported by white middleclass (mostly) women evangelicals in comfortable circumstances who have no idea what goes on in the real world outside of their bubble. And everythig is seen and promoted through that lens by the media.
Comfortable circumstances and ZERO awareness of the physical and psychological needs of the birthmothers. That view of “others” is so narrow!
But God told the….