Safe Haven Baby Boxes Plays with Language: Now Boxed Babies are Refugees!

Ya gotta give those Safe Haven Baby Box Sneaky Pete’s credit.

We learned yesterday, quite by accident, that baby boxers attempted to get a box bill through the Kansas legislature last session under an assumed name: Newborn Refuge Cribs. This term never came through in bill searches because until this bill came along no such term existed. We shouldn’t be surprised, though. For the first couple of years, the baby box contraption was simply called a “Safe Haven Baby Box. ” Then, the cleaner “newborn safety incubator” or “newborn safety device.” We’ve added the new term to our thesaurus.

SB 490 is a pretty standard baby box bill amending the state’s current traditional Safe Haven law. It was sponsored by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary at the request of Republican Senate VP Rick Wilborn. It went nowhere.

Outside of making boxed babies sound like they’re being dropped off by displaced Ukrainians on their way to Poland, the bill contains this rather amusing change of language :

“relinquishing parent” means the biological parent or person
having legal custody of an infant who leaves surrenders the infant with
any person listed in subsection (c) in accordance with this section.

Translation: This box is not a babysitting service. Nobody’s comin back!

The whole idea of Kansas anonyimzing babies really grinds our gears. Kansas is the only state never to seal the original birth certificates of its adoptees. Now somebody wants to erase some of us.

True, the state has a traditional Safe Haven law on the books. We don’t have the stats yet on how many times it’s been used, but we suspect the number is tiny. Likewise, the number of reported discards in the state is tiny–one or two in the last five years. Senator Wilburn’s hometown , McPherson, had a case in 2008. This seems to be it.

Somebody needs to invent a refuge from stupid and cruel adoption policy.