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The Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Legislation Page for 2025 is up. The new year isn’t even a week old, and lawmakers in 4 states have already filed bills to either legalize baby boxes in their states or amend existing laws. There are also some hold-over bills from last year.
Two of these new bills give the lie to SHBB Inc’s claim that their baby abandonment boxes are free–paid for by voluntary contributions and don’t cost the taxpayer a dime. As we pointed out several times before, although much of the funding does come from voluntary donations of individuals, corporations, non-profits, and churches, we are seeing an increasing number of government entities allocate (or propose) big bucks of public funds to pay for the evangelical corporation’s baby abandonment boxes in their states. More information on these bills on the link above.
This year Missouri taxpayers are being asked to allocate $10,000 in individual grants to safe haven baby box “providers.” There is no cap on the number of boxes that can be funded listed in the bill. But just for fun, let’s say that a grant will be limited to one each per Missouri’s 114 counties. That means a taxpayer allocation of $114,000.
Wyoming, so low on the number of reported newborn discards. that the latest statistical chart published by SHBB Inc it’s not even included– suggesting “zero”–is asking a whopping $300,000 to pay for boxes the state doesn’t need.
Now for more fun, let’s add those numbers to already stipulated public fund allocations that we know about through the public record, keeping in mind that there are smaller “grants” allocated from local governments (counties, cities, townships) and other public funds we don’t know about or we have not recorded (we will be going back and look for more):
- State of Indiana: $1,000,000
- Beech Grove, Indiana: $19,000
- State of New Mexico: $330,000 (doesn’t even have a law authorizing boxes)
- City of San Antonio, Texas: $438,000 for 12 boxes
Total: $1,787,000
(Moreover last session Tennessee legislators introduced SB 1671 and H 2067 that mandated DCS to select a location in each county to install a baby box and allocated $2 million to fund the installations. The proposal failed to reach a vote in either house before the session closed. We don’t know if the bills will be introduced this session, but we’d not be surprised.
If the Missouri and Wyoming bills pass this means that a possible $2,211,000 in taxpayer money has been allocated–ie made available– to pay for baby abandonment boxes that are marketed nationwide to lawmakers and the public as “free.” Obviously not all of this money has or will been spent since potential baby box “operators” must have established an installation plan that’s been approved by SHBB Inc. The important thing is that states are making taxpayer money available while SHBB Inc insists that the boxes are a taxpayer-free amenity.
None of these allocations, including this year’s new bills, have ever been discussed, or even mentioned on any SHBB Inc social media site that we know of, nor have they been exposed by the mediam which as usual, remains incurious and complacent, happy to regurgitate the company line. Instead, we get a lot of corpo crying poor. If you’re interested, here’s the latest SHBB Inc 990.
How nuts is this?
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- I’ve been forced to purchase a new computer due to increasing problems with my old one. Unfortunately, there have been problems (blame Windows 11) the worst of which is its failure to connect to my printer, though my old computer, when it decides to run, does connect. As a result I’ve been unable to give a decent reading to some material that needs to be discussed. A techie is coming out to fix the connection, so I should be back in full-time business soon.
- We will have new maps up soon.
- On another note, we are still on Twitter but BlueSky is a real problem. One day we exist, the next day we don’t. Still working on that.
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