Nebraska sets age limit for safe-haven law

Advocates say older children need more aid

Protesters in Omaha held signs last month urging a change in the safe-haven law, which previously had no age limit. Nebraska's law will now have a 30-day age limit. (Nati Harnik/Associated Press)

DECATUR, Neb. - The Legislature yesterday revised an unusual law permitting parents to hand children up to age 18 over to state custody without prosecution, instead limiting its reach to infants up to 30 days old.

The original law, enacted earlier this year, was intended to protect newborns from being abandoned or killed by panicked young mothers. But since Sept. 1, to the shock of officials and the public in Nebraska, 35 older children, many from 10 to 17 years old, have been dropped off at hospitals.

Most were left by desperate parents who said the children were uncontrollable and violent and needed more counseling or psychiatric services than they could find or pay for.

The specter of parents giving up their children prompted national soul-searching about the limits of parental responsibility. It has also highlighted what child welfare advocates say is a widespread shortage of public and private aid, especially mental health services, for strained families and teenagers - a shortage that is likely to worsen as state governments cut budgets.

The Legislature on Thursday established a commission to propose new measures to help people like Lavennia Coover, a 36-year-old divorced mother of three and kindergarten teacher who was at the end of her rope, financially and emotionally, when she decided to hand over her son.

"I still cry every night," Coover said yesterday in an interview at her home in Decatur, a farm town on the Missouri River, about 60 miles north of Omaha. "What parent wouldn't feel guilty doing this?"

Coover's husband left her alone with three children, including an older bipolar daughter and a 12-year-old boy who is doing well. But her 11-year-old son, Skylar, is bipolar, abusive, and violent, she said, and after three years of spotty, expensive, and ineffective psychiatric care she could see no other way to get him the intensive help he needs.

Child welfare officials in Douglas County filed a petition accusing Coover of neglect. She is working to have that changed to a "no fault" transfer of custody.

The abrupt handovers in Nebraska are striking examples of an ongoing, more orderly phenomenon that exposes the shortage of psychiatric help for children. A 2003 report by the General Accounting Office, compiling responses from only 19 states and 30 counties, found that 12,700 children in one year had been placed in child welfare or juvenile justice systems simply so they could receive mental health care.

As the drop-offs continued through the fall in Nebraska, including five cases in which children were driven in from other states, Governor Dave Heineman called an emergency session of the Legislature this week to revise the law.

Earlier this year, Nebraska was the last of the 50 states to adopt a safe-haven law. But instead of specifying that it applied only to infants up to a certain age, as in other states, Nebraska's version used the word "child," opening the door to handovers of children up to age 18.