Six years after first 'safe haven' laws, battles still raging

CHICAGO -- For two years, Tracy and her husband had been waiting for word that a baby was available for the central Illinois couple to adopt. Finally, on a Saturday morning in April 2001, they received a call. Would they adopt a newborn who had been abandoned at a hospital under a new law that allows mothers to drop off their babies within 72 hours of birth at hospitals and police and fire stations without risking prosecution?

Two days later, baby Matthew was theirs.

''I can't say how, but my husband and I just knew this was the right call," said Tracy, 37, who gave only her first name to protect the identity of her son, the first child turned over after the Illinois law passed. ''Who knows what could have happened to him if this law wasn't in place?"

The Illinois law, which was due to expire next year, will become permanent in coming weeks when Governor Rod Blagojevich signs the bill, which passed the Illinois Senate 57 to 0. Yet despite success stories like baby Matthew's, such so-called ''safe haven" laws have generated great controversy in the six years since states first started enacting them.

Only four states -- Vermont, Nebraska, Alaska, and Hawaii -- do not have safe haven laws. California's law is due to expire in the fall and has been the subject of debate in Sacramento this legislative session. A bill to extend the law recently was approved by a House committee, but more hearings will be held before a final vote.

''We're fighting this," said Marley Greiner, executive chair of an adoption advocacy group called Bastard Nation, who has testified before California's Legislature against safe haven laws. ''We know there are legislators who object to this law, but not many are going to come out and say it because people will accuse them of voting not to save a baby. It's a tough spot. But we're trying to make the point that these laws hurt more than they help by actually encouraging women to abandon their babies."

Greiner's group and sister organizations throughout the country are fighting an uphill battle. But they promise to be vocal in the few states without laws, including Hawaii, where a bill originally vetoed by Governor Linda Lingle in 2003 is hung up in the Senate. In Vermont, a bill to allow safe havens stalled in the House Judiciary Committee and will be taken up again in January. In Nebraska, a state committee is studying whether such a law is needed. The Massachusetts safe haven law took effect last October but will expire in 2008 unless it is made permanent.

Idaho and New Mexico may tighten their safe haven laws, specifying where a child can be left and how much information needs to be shared with authorities about the baby's health history.

''You don't need a law to tell a woman it's not a safe idea to leave a baby in a trash can," said Adam Pertman, head of the New York-based Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which has lobbied against safe haven laws. Pertman, who authored ''Adoption Nation," said the heinous cases of infant deaths fuel demands for better laws. But while these laws may seem like an obvious solution for troubled mothers who might otherwise kill, abuse, or neglect their children, the laws can have a negative effect, he said.

''Are [babies] being left in safe havens? Yes. But there's no reason to think these same women wouldn't have been placed in safe areas, with an adoption agency, with a grandmother, anyway," Pertman said. ''Now, [the newborns] don't have an identity, they don't have medical information."

It's the ease with which babies can be legally abandoned that concerns adoption advocates. Women who may be thinking twice about having a baby, or who may be suffering the initial stress after delivery, might use these laws as an excuse to simply dump on someone else rather than seek counseling or place them with a relative, according to Pertman and a 2003 Donaldson Institute study.

''Those who are in enough of a crisis to abandon a baby will probably still do so, and they're not getting the help, the true social services they need," said Melissa Barrigar, vice president of Ethica, an adoption advocacy group in Tennessee, who testified against extending the Illinois law.

Groups such as Ethica also worry that abandoned newborns could be funneled into overburdened state child-welfare agencies and bounced between foster homes, or end up in state-run children's homes instead of with stable families screened by adoption agencies.

The idea of safe havens first took hold in Alabama's Mobile County in 1998, after what District Attorney John Tyson described as a ''very rough" murder in which a baby was drowned in a toilet upon birth by the mother and grandmother. Both women were convicted of murder.

The first statewide law was passed in Texas in 1999. Alabama adopted a state law the following year.

There is no official count of babies recovered through safe haven laws because of confidentiality concerns of hospitals and police, although safe haven advocates keep track in some states.

Dawn Garris, head of Save Abandoned Babies Foundation in Illinois, said she has found 561 cases across the country, though she says the count is unofficial and based largely on reporting by groups like hers and from news accounts.

Critics contend that number is greatly exaggerated because many abandoned babies were counted as ''saved" under the law, regardless of where they were abandoned.

''Here in California, they include a 2-day-old baby who was left alone outside a bar in a shopping cart," Greiner said. ''Is that a safe haven?"