The so called “baby Moses” or “safe haven” laws were passed nationwide on the assurances of those advocating legalized child abandonment that unsafe child abandonments and the number of dead babies would decrease, if not stop altogether.  Now having more than a decades’ worth of a track record we see nothing could be farther from the truth.

Now with each new neonatacide or unsafe child abandonment instead of acknowleging the inherent failures of their law,  their tune has changed, insisting that these failures are mere byproducts of a “lack of educational effort” and demanding new monies be allocated to produce promotional materials, that legalized child abandonment advocates should be brought into school classrooms, and free media time be granted to their program such that women might be better taught their notion of a” best way” to abandon their children.

The human and civil rights consequences to the children who are processed through such schemes and the health concerns of their mothers are almost systematically disregarded and all too often treated as irrelevant.

In two of the cases I’m about to detail, where the mothers have been identified, they have been fortunate to receive both medical and mental health care. But had they not entered the system, as we’ll see in the third case, no follow up medical support for the mother has been possible. The baby dump laws place women in a very similar position, whereby they bring the child in, but may or may not receive any post-birth giving medical or counseling care themselves, let alone any legal counseling regarding the lifelong decision they are about to make, or counsel regarding what forms of support, financial or otherwise she may be entitled to.

So by way of follow up to my two pieces from earlier this month:

• After almost a decade, Mississippi “safe haven” legalized child abandonment scheme still fails
• A compilation of Mississippi legalized child abandonment cases and “safe haven” failures

I offer a few links about the three cases I’ve found from 2010 that pertain to the law, and it’s failures. As I summarized:

the (at least) three cases I’ll be working with will be those of:

• Linda Nash who stabbed her newborn to death. The baby was born at home; Linda says she didn’t know she was pregnant.  She’s a Type 2 diabetic, and an adoptee.
• the dead baby found in a suitcase earlier this summer
• and this latest child abandonment of a (live) child left at a Salvation Army donation drop off, outside the legalized child abandonment system

Of these three, they amount to two cases of neonatacide and one case of an illegal child abandonment  not in a designated drop point.

So I’ll begin with the tragic case of Linda Nash, (age 16.)

As I summarized, her child was born at home in Linda’s adoptive parents home. She claims to have been unaware she was pregnant at the time.

Her trial included testimony about her having been a type 2 diabetic and how such may have affected her thought process. After giving birth, she “freaked out” and stabbed the newborn to death in a panic as her adoptive mother banged on the locked bathroom door. Her parents took her to the police.

She was sentenced to the minimum amount of prison time required under Mississippi law in part due to the “mitigating circumstances” at the center of the case, Among them the revelation of the identity of the newborn’s father: her 14-year-old brother, Lewis

The Panolian search on Linda Nash provides a number of articles, I’ll include one or two below but this is the link to the full set:

http://www.panolian.com/v2/content.aspx?&MemberID=1180&module=Page&ID=481&SiteSearch=1

* WMCTV, February 1, 2010

Mississippi teen charged with stabbing newborn daughter to death

http://www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s=11915033

* Fox Memphis, February 1, 2010

Teen Mom Arrested for Murdering Newborn

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/dpp/news/local/020110-teen-mom-arrested-for-murdering-newborn

* myeyewitnessnews.com, February 2, 2010

Mississippi Teen Charged with Murdering Newborn

http://www.myeyewitnessnews.com/news/local/story/Mississippi-Teen-Charged-with-Murdering-Newborn/GeMB2qS6HEilkQKh3VWhtA.cspx

* wmctv February 2, 2010

Batesville reacts in shock to murder of newborn baby

http://www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s=11921567

* News 3, February 3, 2010

Experts Work To Help Teen Parents Avoid Abusing Their New Born Babies

http://www.wreg.com/wreg-help-for-teens-story,0,1237091.story

* The Mississippi Link, February 5, 2010

Teen mom stabs newborn to death

http://www.mississippilink.com/news/article_9e55e72c-1278-11df-87a7-001cc4c03286.html

* The Mississippi Link August 25, 2010

Teen who stabbed newborn will go to trial

http://www.mississippilink.com/news/article_e33d2956-b005-11df-83b4-001cc4c03286.html

* Fox Memphis, Setember 17, 2010

Teen Takes Reduced Charge in Baby’s Death

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/dpp/news/local/091710-teen-strikes-plea-deal-in-baby’s-death

* The Panolian, September 21, 2010

Prosecutor: mother killed newborn boy with scissors

http://www.panolian.com/v2/content.aspx?module=ContentItem&ID=188626&MemberID=1180

* Fox News, Oct 1, 2010

Linda Nash, Teen Convicted of Killing Newborn, Will Serve Prison Time

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/dpp/news/local/100110-linda-nash,-teen-convicted-of-killing-newborn,-will-serve-prison-time

* The Panolian, October 5, 2010

Nash: I stabbed newborn while ‘freaked out,’ scared

http://www.panolian.com/v2/content.aspx?module=ContentItem&ID=189717&MemberID=1180

Moving on to the second case from Mississippi this year, in early July, Sheila Ealey, 41 gave birth to boy at home with no medical assistance, and then within 24 hours wrapped the live child,  the umbilical cord still attached, in a garbage bag, wrapped a blanket around it and placed it in a suitcase which was left behind her local church.

The suitcase was discovered while clearing weeds around the property. Her pregnancy had been hidden. She was already a single mother to five other children. When the body was discovered, she turned herself in.

Sheriff: Baby Found In Suitcase Was Born Alive At Home

A baby boy that was found dead in a suitcase last week was born alive, Madison County Sheriff Toby Trowbridge said on Tuesday.

The newborn was found Friday afternoon in a garbage bag, wrapped in a blanket, inside the suitcase, behind the Smith Chapel Baptist Church in the 300 block of Livingston Vernon Road in Flora, the sheriff said.

Sheila Ealey is charged with murder in connection with the boy’s death, Trowbridge said. She surrendered to authorities Friday night, he said.

Additional articles and video segments:

* WAPT.com, July 2, 2010

Woman Charged After Baby Found Dead In Suitcase

http://www.wapt.com/news/24127982/detail.html

* my601.com July 5, 2010

Flora Woman In Connection With Dead Baby In Church Graveyard Charged With Murder

http://www.my601.com/news/state/story/Dead-baby-suitcase-church/5-gFrPDCtkqbS1CAtEPjtQ.cspx

* WAPT.com July 6, 2010

Sheriff: Baby Found In Suitcase Was Born Alive At Home

http://www.wapt.com/r/24159059/detail.html

* WLBT.com, July 6, 2010

Ealey expected to appear in court Tuesday

http://www.wlbt.com/global/story.asp?s=12759037

* my601.com July 6, 2010

Family of Flora Mother Charged with Infant’s Murder: “We’re Shocked”

http://www.my601.com/mostpopular/story/Family-of-Flora-Mother-Charged-with-Infants/FN_MMpybMkqiDTpnUiBr4Q.cspx

* wjtv.com July 7, 2010

Grand Jury to Soon Hear Case of Mother Accused of Killing Infant Son

http://www2.wjtv.com/jtv/news/local/article/grand_jury_to_soon_hear_case_of_mother_accused_of_killing

_infant_son/166493/

* my 601.com July 8, 2010

$35K Bond Set for Flora Woman Accused in Baby’s Murder

http://www.my601.com/mostpopular/story/35K-Bond-Set-for-Flora-Woman-Accused-in-Babys/8fZMMlfjVkmNylg87NMLWg.cspx

* WAPT.com July 8,2010

Woman Charged In Baby’s Death Released On $35K Bond

http://www.wapt.com/r/24181335/detail.html

* WAPT.com July 9, 2010 (This piece is little more than a commercial for Bethany Christian Services, an adoption agency, but naturally, they’re happy to capitalize on the case.)

Ealey’s Situation More Common Than You May Think

http://www.wapt.com/video/24195842/detail.html

* (Also see Parents of newborn sought from October 14, 2010 that provides a slight recap at the bottom of the article.)

I’m still working to see if I can find any additional online coverage of the case after July.

Photo: Justin Lewis, WTVA

Finally, we come to the case from earlier this month of a (live) less than week old Hispanic baby left off at an unattended Salvation Army donation station wrapped up and strapped into a car seat that I blogged about at the time, see my post After almost a decade, Mississippi “safe haven” legalized child abandonment scheme still fails.

A hospital, which would have been a legal authorized “safe haven” site was less than a mile away. The child has been placed with a foster family.

* WCBI.com October 13, 2010

Baby Found Abandoned in Houston; Mother Sought

http://wcbi.com/article.php?subaction=showfull&id=1286983508&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2,40&

* WTVA October 13, 2010

Baby found at door of Salvation Army

http://www.wtva.com/news/local/story/Baby-found-at-door-of-Salvation-Army/Znx8eUfTREOa8bVbUFUDdw.cspx

* WTVA October 13, 2010

Abandoned newborn found in Houston

http://www.wtva.com/news/local/story/Abandoned-newborn-found-in-Houston/r8WhEkZukkWpwB2huFHRGg.cspx

* Hattiesburg American October 13, 2010

Baby left at Salvation Army site in Mississippi

http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/article/20101013/NEWS01/101013015/Baby-left-at-Salvation-Army-site-in-Mississippi

* myfoxmemphis, October 13, 2010

Baby Left at Salvation Army Site In Miss.

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/dpp/news/local/101310-baby-left-at-salvation-army-site-in-miss.

*The Clarion Ledger, October 14, 2010

Parents of newborn sought

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20101014/NEWS/10140358/Parents-of-newborn-sought

* nems360.c0m October 14, 2010

Baby abandoned at Salvation Army in Houston

http://nems360.com/bookmark/9895145

*AP October 14, 2010

Baby left at Salvation Army site in Miss.

http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2010/oct/14/baby-left-salvation-army-site-miss/

* The Clarion Ledger October 14, 2010

Abandoned Mississippi baby’s parents not found

http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20101014/NEWS/101014020/Abandoned-Mississippi-baby-s-parents-not-found&template=artsemantics&server=MOC-WN0484

* The Calhoun County Journal

Parents of abandoned baby in Houston being sought

http://www.calhouncountyjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3190:parents-of-abandoned-baby-in-houston-being-sought&catid=1:latest-news

To date, I see nothing to suggest the child’s parents have been identified. If they are found, the mother at least may face felony charges.

We can only hope she’s alright after having given birth in secret. Odds are, we’ll simply never know.

None of these three cases represent good outcomes for either the women or their children.

As I wrote in Emily Portellos, crimes against “women’s essentialist nature,” and the pointlessness of imprisonment:

…we as a society need to do better by them.

• My introduction
• Some links towards context & historical perspective on the situation in New Jersey
• The Bastard Nation Action Alert- Stop New Jersey A1406/S799 Today!

New Jersey’s A1406/S799 is NOT an adoptee rights bill.

It is yet another fake/conditional access for a lucky few at the direct cost of the human/civil/identity rights of others bill. Like so many other states this year, New Jersey’s legislative disaster is once again, disingenuously cloaked in the language of “adoptee rights.” (See my recent post Adoptee Rights 101: Class Bastard and how to recognize a genuine adoptee rights bill for a field guide towards determining the real from the fake.)

Among the bill’s many fatal flaws, if A1406/S799 were to pass:

• New Jersey will carve out a new state granted veto privilege that can be used against adopted people’s original birth certificate access.
• Those who would be granted the newly constructed veto privilege, Parents, will not have their rights come out unscathed either, as they would have to submit an intrusive and likely illegal medical and family history form to activate the contact veto or file a “contact preference form.” The state essentially extorting personal medical information under these conditions in order to enact this newly constructed veto or express a personal contact preference constitutes nothing less than a potential HIPAA violation. In states such as Oregon, where “contract preference forms” originated, not only do they not have the force of law behind them,  the states does not use such as a tool with with to extract a parent’s personal medical history. Real adoptee rights activists understand inherent to the toll adoption already extracts from our families must never be their genuine personal medical privacy, these are interpersonal and family matters best left to individuals, not new state bureaucracies.
• A1406/S799 also stands to reclassify all infants who pass through New Jersey’s baby dump/ “safe haven” program as automatically having their birth certificates sealed as a default setting. Not only are most kids who endure the state’s baby dump system born in hospitals to identified mothers, as I documented, New Jersey is one of the states where Boarder Babies are routinely being folded into “Safe Haven” the state’s statistics/are being classified as “safe haven” babies. Thus Boarder Babies, those born in hospitals to indentified Mothers and abandoned post birth at the hospitals would have their identities stripped from them as a routine matter.

This means that in New Jersey under this legislation deceptively being sold as a means by which “adoptee rights” would be restored, New Jersey’s boarder babies and baby dump babies will now have their records sealed as default.

So called “Adoptee Rights”cannot be “won” at the direct expense of abandoned children.

Unsealing some original birth certificates while simultaneously using alleged “open records” legislation seal the original birth certificates of others is no victory. It changes the very meaning of this so called “adoptee rights” legislation to that of merely another tool to seal yet more records. But as they are the records of those with some of the least voice politically, certain individuals and organizations are apparently more than willing to “trade them away.”

A1406/S799 stands to gut the existing human/civil/identity rights of a number of kids who stand to eventually enter the state’s foster care or adoption systems.

What access it could grant to some New Jersey adoptees is a price that will be paid by the state’s abandoned, and later fostered or adopted kids.

To anyone who cares about the rights and access of anyone other than themselves, A1406/S799 cannot be considered any form of progress. It stands to do lasting damage to some of New Jersey’s most vulnerable populations.

The bill is not merely short sighted, it’s a classic example of bait and switch; it promises increased access to original birth certificates for one set of people, yet takes that same access from, those “safe havened” or boarder babies and  a next generation of New Jersey’s most vulnerable and voiceless.

It harnesses the desperation of one set of adopted people and their families and in a genuinely cynical political twist, utilizes that desperation back as a tool against yet another set of kids.

It’s both tragic and sad to see some adoptees fall for it.

Only those either unwilling to see the damage it will do, or who simply do not care about the damage it will do could support such a bill.

For more context on New Jersey, readers may want to revisit several of my earlier pieces:

• Action Alert- Stop New Jersey S799, NJ Senate Vote scheduled for Monday
• New Jersey- let A752 die: the conflation of family medical history with authentic restored access, white outs, and preemptive restraining orders among other nightmare senarios (on the earlier bill)
• Catholic Charities offers up another lifetime’s worth of lies and false “reunion”

As well as some of Bastardette’s NJ related posts:

• S799: ANOTHER NEW JERSEY UPDATE
• NEW JERSEY UPDATE – S799 PASSES SENATE. ADOPTEES JILTED
• NEW JERSEY S799: THE JERSEY FOLLIES–DESIRE OVER RIGHTS
• NEW JERSEY PIECE-A-CRAP IS BAAACCCKKK!: S799
• GOOD NEWS: CAL AND JERSEY BAD BILLS DIE (from back in Jan. on the earlier bill)
• NEW JERSEY: ANYTHING TO GET A BILL PASSED. WE LEAVE EVERYBODY BEHIND! (about the earlier bill)
• BE CAREFUL OF WHAT YOU ASK FOR! NEW JERSEY CATHOLIC CONFERENCE WANTS TO HEAR FIRST MOTHER STORIES!
• MOTHER MAY I? GRANNIE ANNIE NAILS IT! (from 2006)
• DIMWITS: IN THE WORDS OF 9 NEW JERSEY ADOPTEE HATERS (also from 2006 on NJ S1087.)
• SOME-ADOPTEES-ARE-MORE-EQUAL-THAN-OTHERS BILL PASSES NEW JERSEY SENATE
• SETTLING FOR LESS THAN YOU DESERVE: WHY BASTARD NATION REJECTS ALL ARGUMENTS FOR AND AGAINST NEW JERSEY’S S1087
• IS ADOPTION ANTI-FAMILY?
• ACLU SLAGS ADOPTEES AGAIN (2005)

Bastard Nation’s NJ related action alerts and letters:

• BASTARD NATION LETTER TO NJ SENATE: VOTE NO ON S799
• BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: STOP NEW JERSEY S799. SENATE VOTE SCHEDULED FOR MONDAY
• BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: NEW JERSEY S799 – VOTE NO!
• BASTARD NATION’S LETTER TO NJ HOUSE SPEAKER JOSEPH ROBERTS, JR–PLEASE OPPOSE A 752. ADOPTEE DESERVE RIGHTS NOT FAVORS! (about the earlier bill)
• BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT: VOTE NO ON S1087/A2557–COMPROMISED OPEN RECORDS BILL (from 2006)
• BASTARD NATION’S LETTER TO THE NJ SENATE: VOTE NO ON S1087/A2557!

Also see NJ related baby dump posts, some by me, some by Bastardette:

• NEW JERSEY: THIS IS NOT A SAFE HAVEN….
• New Jersey- Boarder Babies being folded into “Safe Haven” statistics
• Still more Border Babies routinely relabeled “safe haven saves” in OH, NJ, MI, and KY

All of which is to say, this botched bill has been a long time coming. It’s merely the latest retread in a long lines of fake bills New Jersey has offered up year after agonizing year.

Bastards have tracked it as it developed through the years and have fought this crap down time and time again.

Please, read and act on the Bastard Nation action alert below, there is precious little time left to work to kill this fatally flawed bill. If passed, the damage will be lasting.

Keep in mind, no state that has ever passed conditional access legislation has ever revisited it or increased access to more adoptees later.

Those who settle for less than full equality and the full restoration of our human rights, on top of the damage they will do to their own rights, will sentence New Jersey’s abandoned kids to precisely the injustice they claim to be fighting.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT – STOP NEW JERSEY A1406/S799 TODAY!

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BASTARD NATION ACTION ALERT!

STOP DISCLOSURE VETO/WHITE OUT LEGISLATION IN NEW JERSEY!!!

ASK THE NEW JERSEY ASSEMBLY HUMAN SERVICES COMMITTEE:VOTE NO ON A1406/S799

DON’T LET PASSAGE OF BAD LEGISLATION IN NEW JERSEY THREATEN EFFORTS IN OTHER STATES FOR TRUE EQUAL ACCESS FOR ADULT

IT’S BACK!

A1406 (companion to S799 already passed in the NJ Senate) is scheduled for a hearing in the Assembly Human Services Committee on June 14.

Please contact committee members immediately and urge them to VOTE NO ON A1406/S799. See contact information below.If you are from or in New Jersey or have a New Jersey connection, be sure to mention it in your communication.

Be sure to put: “A1406 – opposition ” in the header

A1406/S799 is: restrictive, discriminatory, creates a new, special and temporary ”right” for "birthparents," and exempts the state’s adopted adults from equal protection and treatment regarding the release of the government-generated public record of their births.

The bill:

*includes a 12- month open enrollment period, starting after the Department of Health releases regs for A1406/S799 implementation, that allows "birthparents," to file disclosure vetoes before obcs, past and future, are unsealed

*authorizes the state to replace the original birth certificate, of those subjected to the DV, with a mutilated copy of the obc with all identifying information, including the address of the parent(s) at the time of birth (if it appears on the cert) deleted.

*requires "birthparents" who file a disclosure veto to submit an intrusive and probably illegal medical and family history form to activate the veto.

*requires "birthparents" who file a "contact preference form" to fill out the same intrusive and probably illegal medical and family history form.

*seals by default all “safe haven” birth certificates, even though most “safe haven” babies are born in hospitals to identified mothers.

*requires adoption agencies and adoption lawyers to receive a written veto status report from the state before they can release identifying information to adoptees

*requires the state to mount an "information" campaign to inform "birthparents" of their "protection" options

A1406/S799 IS NOT AN OBC ACCESS BILL.
A1406/S799 IS NOT ABOUT RIGHTS.
A1406/S799 IS ABOUT PRIVILEGE

Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization opposes legislation that denies any adult adoptees access to their own original birth records on par with all other citizens. Please let the Health, Human Services, and Senior Citizen Committee know that this issue is not about relationships between adoptees and their "birthparents." It is about basic human and civil rights and the relationship between adoptees and the STATE of NEW JERSEY.

The New Jersey state government should not be in the business of denying adult adoptees access to their own birth certificates in a misguided attempt to appease a mythical adversarial standoff between adoptees and birthparents.

Inclusion of a disclosure veto in this bill, even within the 12-month "window of opportunity" perpetuates the violation of adoptee rights by making unaltered birth certificate access a privilege not a right.

Forcing "birthparents," under certain circumstances, to submit mandatory health and family history information to the state is intrusive and probably illegal.

Passage of bad legislation is New Jersey could easily undermine efforts of dedicated reformers who are holding the line for adoptee rights in other states.

New Jersey’s A1406/S799 is an abomination in light of the restoration of the right of original birth certificate access to all persons adopted in Oregon, Alabama, and New Hampshire, and Maine. Adult adoptees and all who support adoptee rights should stand united for unrestricted access laws and not sell out just to get a bill passed! Disclosure veto legislation is unethical and unjust!

Please e-mail the New Jersey Senate and urge them to VOTE NO ON A1406/S799

READ THE FULL TEXT AT: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2010/Bills/A1500/1406_I1.PDF

CONTACT INFORMATION.
The New Jersey Leg page has no list of email addresses, You need to go to each individual Rep member page and use the template http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/members/abcroster.asp

Human Services Committee:

Vainieri Huttle, Valerie – Chair
Rodriguez, Caridad – Vice-Chair
Angelini, Mary Pat
Biondi, Peter J.
Coutinho, Albert
Fuentes, Angel
McHose, Alison Littell
O’Scanlon, Declan J.
Tucker, Cleopatra G.
Wagner, Connie

Also write to Gov. Chris Christie
Proponents of A1406/S799 have asked supporters to sent letters of support to Gov. Chris Christie now. We urge you to do sent letters of opposition. Send letters no more than 250 words at this template: http://www.state.nj.us/governor/contact/

or contact him at:

Office of the Governor
PO Box 001
Trenton, NJ 08625
609-292-6000

Bastard Nation has submitted opposition testimony to the Human Services Committee, but will ot post it until after the hearing. We have also sent a letter to Governor Christie.

Between both the Ohio House and Senate there was but one sole dissenting vote cast by Sen. Jeff Jacobson (R.)

The expansion bill SB 304, now sits on Governor Ted Strickland’s desk awaiting his signature.

Aging up would merely condemn yet more kids to enduring state sanctioned legalized child abandonment. It would expand and further embed legalized child dumping into the Ohio infrastructure and schools.

Other states have faced similar attempts at expansion, California for example has time and again been faced with attempts to age up that have each time been refused, (see CALIFORNIA: THE TERMINATOR TERMINATES “SAFE HAVEN” BABY DUMP EXPANSION AGAIN.)

Marley, over on the Daily Bastardette also has an incredible piece up today about the dump-law mess in Ohio and first person recounting of the reactions opponents of the legalized child abandonment bill have received:

OHIO: LAME DUCKS SELL OUT FAMILIES, EXPAND SAFE HAVENS. CONSIDER ABANDONMENT A GIFT FROM MOM! (I STRONGLY recommend readers follow the link across.)

Her piece also details the broader background of the dump law landscape in Ohio and makes it clear, some of what Ohio is counting as “safe haven” cases are likely nothing more than boarder baby cases folded in to inflate the statistics. (See my earlier piece on how New Jersey is folding boarder babies into its “safe haven” stats.)

***

Governor Strickland needs to hear from opponents of the “age up”. (Ultimately the dump laws themselves need to be repealed.) For the purposes of this bill however, contacting the Governor and urging he not enlarge the already failed legalized child abandonment program is a starting point.

He can be contacted via his webpage contact form.

Phone- General Info: (614) 466-3555

Fax- Fax: (614) 466-9354

Or snail mail-

Governor’s Office
Riffe Center, 30th Floor
77 South High Street
Columbus, OH 43215-6108

As time is of the essence, I advise contact via e-mail and phone calls with faxes or letters as a form of follow up.

***

This is a copy of the brief note I sent through Governor Strickland’s contact page back on 12/10/08-

I am writing to urgently request you reject increasing the age limit on Ohio’s “safe haven”/legalized child abandonment law.

The legalized child abandonment expansion bill (SB 304) is a tragic expansion of an already disastrous policy.

It is bad enough that state encouragement of child abandonment has already become woven into the fabric of Ohio law and school curriculums, the expansion bill potentially increases the number of babies who will endure the lifelong effects of child abandonment.

I am an adult adoptee, born and raised in Ohio, who has spent several years researching the effects of legalized child dumping. Dump laws cause lifelong damage to kids, their families and communities.

They should be repealed, not expanded.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

-Lauren Sabina Kneisly
co-author of Children of the Corn (http://cornkids.blogspot.com/)
Reporting, Theory,and Opinion on Legalized Child Dumping in Nebraska

***

Another day, another out of state dump, this time, a boy from Florida.

The AP has an article out, just a couple hours old at this point, 11-year-old boy is 31st Nebraska ’safe haven’ case.

 Todd Landry, director of children and family services for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the boy’s father left him at Boys Town National Research Hospital on Wednesday afternoon.

The latest Nebraska DHHS summary of the officially counted dump cases (link opens a PDF) lists the boy as being from Miami-Dade County, FL. How he was transported to Nebraska remains to be seen.

***

Also, here on the eve of the beginning of the special session, Nebraska DHHS has compiled a chart detailing some basic statistics on their official count (link opens a PDF) now at 31 though the chart only covers the first 30 .

The chart while not counting a number of attempted “safe haven” and self “haven” cases, is still an incredibly useful tool.

For example, we learn 11 of the 30 were either adopted/guardianship or relative placements, what I had been terming “returns department” dumps. 17 of the kids have been previously or currently are state wards.

28 of the kids have endured prior allegation(s) of abuse neglect.

Perhaps most importantly, NONE of these kids were at risk of immediate harm.

The chart shows check marks alongside all 30 kids as assessed as safe from immediate harm, though the tabulation at the bottom of the page reads 29 instead of all 30. If the raison d’etre for the dump law was to protect kids from immediate harm, the Nebraska case study shows a unanimous failure.

27 of the kids had experienced some level of prior mental health services. 7 had had prior mental health treatment listed as “higher than outpatient”.

27 of the kids came from single parent homes.

As to the dumps themselves, 25 of them came in on weekends after 4pm. (this was precisely the pattern Marley/Bastardette and I were noting.)

Currently

• 11 are in foster care
• 8 are in a relative’s home
• 6 are in the temporary emergency shelter
• 2 are in hospitals
• 1 is in a group home (* see below)
• 1 is in a treatment group home
• and one kid has returned to their own home

Going by the check marks on the chart, 9 are classified as “Black, 1 is classified as “White/Native”, and 20 are classified as “White”, and “. (The summary at the bottom of the chart says “8 Black, 1 White/Native, 20 White” which only adds up to 29, not 30.)

(I’m unclear on how the Staton kids are being classified, apparently as mostly “White” though that has been an important question, see my piece Nebraska- the Staton abandonment and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) for further discussion of such and how the Staton abandonment raises questions of Nebraska’s ICWA obligations.)

Both Marley/Bastardette and I have been working up our own tabulations statistically, particularly as relating to the number of child dumps that Nebraska is refusing to count in the official tally.

The official count now stands at 31, our count now stands at 42. (See my earlier piece Nebraska- another ghost in the machine dump (unoffical total 41, the official count reaches 30 for further details.) roughly 1/4 of the abandonment cases are not included in the state’s tally.

We had been tracking many of the same kinds of details about the case studies (whether in the official count or not,) particularly some of the outcomes on the out of state dumps and the 18 year olds.

Allow me a few examples to scratch the surface of just a few of the more interesting ‘undercounts’ and possibly incorrectly tabulated:

• The plight of the 18 year old uncounted Grand Island self “haven” boy- Therapist: Safe-haven hubbub shows families need respite help
• * The Iowa dumpee who after being shipped back to Iowa by Nebraska (a “return to sender” out of state dump) went on to become a teen runaway, Girl now a runaway after safe-haven stint and ‘Safe haven’ runaway found, police say. Being 14, she was included in the official count, (she was the initial out of state dump case.) Nebraska shipped her back home to Iowa ASAP so as to avoid the precedent of out of state kids being able to land in the Nebraska system. You tell me, does it sound like she got the help she needed? As I don’t see ‘teen runaway’ under the options listed in the “current placement” column, she is clearly being counted as something else. The second article says she had been ” placed in a home for troubled youths” prior to running away, so perhaps she is still inaccurately being counted as being in a “group home?”
• Here, for example is yet another 18 year old abandonee left out, not in the official tabulation- Two more teenagers dropped off.

The list of examples goes on and on. My point is, many are not even in the stats and of those that are, Nebraska may for example think the Iowa girl is still in a group home outcome when in fact she’s been a runaway.

It’s a disaster, and the actual follow up with the kids seems to not fully be in place even on the 42 cases to date.

Perhaps Nebraska legislators would care to deal with the mess they’ve already created before they go creating yet still more (and a whole new class of) dumped kids?

Aging down to newborns under dump law 2.0 cannot and will not deal with the fundamental flaws and problems inherent to all legalized child abandonment laws.

***

Repeal the dump laws now.

Nebraska’s record of failure is no foundation to build upon.

***

Addendum- just as I came to the end of this post, I ran across the Omaha World-Herald’s piece, There are common threads in haven drop-offs. Apparently they’ve been crunching the numbers provided by the Nebraska DHHS as well.

According to the article:

HHS officials provided the analysis, along with a letter, to state senators Wednesday.

Here are the key sentences:

Nebraska’s law was intended to protect children in immediate danger of being harmed, Landry said in the letter to senators. The HHS analysis found no threat of immediate harm in any of the 30 cases.

and

“The role of the state’s child welfare system is to protect children who are fundamentally unsafe,” Landry said. “For children or youth who are otherwise safe, it is not the role of the state to intervene in a family’s life.”

So the only question that remains is, will Nebraska state legislators listen to those most intimately acquainted with the dump law;

• the kids themselves
• child welfare experts
• Nebraska’s own DHHS
• parents and other relatives
• adoptee rights experts
• First Nations peoples’ ICWA concerns
• etc

or will they continue on, closing their eyes, covering their ears, hell bent upon their fantasy of making the dump law “work?”

One can only hope cooler heads will prevail.

***

Repeal the dump laws now.

Every single day the dump laws remain on the books is another day of failure.

Yes, a special session should be called, but not to age down and ensure the disaster continues, just against younger kids.

The special session should be called to do one thing and do it right, put a stop to legalized child abandonment in Nebraska.

Stop the bleeding. Ensure that no more kids and families are going to put through this ordeal.

Then after the door is shut, begin to tackle the root problems.

It’s time to decouple “getting help” from loss of family and custody.

One can absolutely support providing help to families in crisis while SIMULTANEOUSLY opposing dump laws.

In fact, such is the more humane position, as the “cost” of getting help must not be a kid’s family and world. No kid should ever have to endure such. Whether a kid can remember being dumped personally, or “merely” has to live with the consequences of being dumped as a baby for the rest of their lives, enduring abandonment is never good for kids.

There are now 41 kids who have undergone permutations of the Nebraska dump law child welfare fiasco. There may be more still by the time the special session finally concludes, (and who knows whether a change in the law will even come at the conclusion of such.) But while legislators should be ashamed of the crass and often arbitrary way they played with these kids lives, the problems these families face are more pressing than any blame game.

Those kids and those families are going to need real solutions. Not blather, not outsourcing to “faith-based” quackery, not empty promises, and most of all, not endless referrals around in circles to “help” that never seems to exist in practice. Concrete solutions.

Nebraska politicians made this particular legislative mess, now they owe it to the victims of such to enable genuine access to what they need.

Separately, both in Nebraska and nationally, real lasting solutions for kids and families both approaching and in crisis are going to have to be crafted. Preventative care. Spaces where parents and guardians can take a “time out” without fear of losing their custodial rights. Access to genuine mental health services (which yes, means tackling the health care crisis in America.) Etc.

These families live at the intersection of many systemic problems. The child dumps are but symptoms of deep long neglected systemic problems. The kids are left paying the price.

Dump laws are no solution.

They only create further problems that last lifetimes.

Nothing less than full repeal.

***

As I blogged yesterday, last Tuesday a second teen attempted to self “haven” under Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment law.

Turns out when it comes to teens turning themselves in, Nebraska’s “haven” is little more than a cruel joke. Anyone with physical custody of a “child” (which in Nebraska is anyone under age 19) is protected under the law when abandoning said “child”, all in the name of supposedly protecting kids from potential imminent harm.

Yet if a “child” in Nebraska turns themselves in seeking help, after for example being allegedly being hit, then kicked out of her home by her mother, the lack-of-haven law apparently doesn’t apply to them, they don’t qualify.

Had this girl managed to bribe a bum off the street for a bottle of booze to take her to the hospital that would have qualified, but because she showed up alone, she’s shit outta luck.

But wait, it gets even weirder, see Teen’s Surrender Not A ‘Safe Haven’ Case, which mentions:

A sixteen-year-old girl who surrendered herself and her child under Nebraska’s Safe Haven law has discovered that the law doesn’t apply to her.

and

Crawford said her sister escorted the teenager and the baby.

“This is a mother-daughter argument that my sister took to the extreme and blew this out of proportion,” said Crawford.

Yes, the mother’s sister (the girl’s aunt) “escorted” our self surrendering teen, who it just so happens is also a teen mother, who brought her baby along with her to Immanuel Hospital in Omaha after allegedly being hit and kicked out of the house.

Ok, so let’s try to detangle this one.

The aunt “escorted” her to the state authorized site, but apparently the teen attempted to haven herself (and her baby.)

Could this mean the rough equivalent of for example, the aunt drove here there but she walked in by herself? How much a part of this was or wasn’t the aunt? If she was an intrinsic part of the girl getting from wherever she was to the hospital, then what? Just how much of an adult presence in the circumstances of a “havening” counts as enough for it to be counted as a “safe haven” by Nebraska DHHS? If the aunt stood 5 feet away at the time and the girl announced her intention to “haven” herself, does that still fail to pass the physical custody test? Whose idea was it for the girl to “haven” herself? Her own? Or did the Aunt bring it up?

What exactly does “escorted” mean in this context?

All of which simply means we’re left with more questions than answers.

Not surprising considering how make-it-up-as-we-go-along Nebraska’s approach to how the law is applied has been. When it has come to the practical application, despite Nebraska DHHS’s attempts to map out a process (see here, under “Other Documents”) there are simply too many unanswered variables.

Case after case is bringing all those things that were unanticipated by some, to the fore, questions such as Nebraska’s Indian Child Welfare Act obligations, or what happens when teens begin self “havening,” as Nebraska is the only state with a law with an age cap high enough whereby teens could.

So now let’s come to part two of the great unstrategized. This high school sophomore showed up with her baby in arms, attempting to self “haven” both herself and her baby. Nebraska won’t qualify her as a legalized child abandonment, but what about the baby? It was brought in by someone with physical custody, to a state authorized legalized child abandonment site. Does the baby now enter the system without her? Or are they allowed to remain together? If she doesn’t count does the baby not count as well? Or are they going to take the baby away?

Has anyone even begun thinking about all this mess?

The “report” referred to below would appear to allege physical and emotional abuse by Portia Crawford (the girl’s mother):

Court documents said Crawford didn’t take care of her daughter and grandson and didn’t give them a stable place to stay. Juvenile court attorneys said Crawford emotionally abused her daughter by calling her dumb and telling her she looked like a whore.

“I didn’t do all the allegations that they got in the report, bloody her nose and call her all sorts of names. I didn’t do all that. They blew this out of proportion,” Crawford said. “There was no neglect or abuse here, just an argument. My daughter got upset about it, that’s all that happened.”

But as for the girl herself, because Nebraska thinks she doesn’t qualify, she’s got “nowhere to go,” which is to say she has allegedly been hit and kicked out by her mother, then abandoned in her hour of need by the state, under the very law that was supposedly designed to protect kids in dire situations:

“They have nowhere to go because they’re not safe in Portia’s home,” said juvenile county attorney Nicole Goaley.

She said Crawford’s daughter and grandson will get the services they need, but they don’t qualify for the Safe Haven law. Goaley said Crawford would have to give up her daughter and grandson in order for the law to apply and Crawford won’t do that.

I hear lots of they’ll “get the services they need” but I’ll be watching to see how that plays out in practical application.

As for the “Safe Haven” law, clearly it’s unworthy of bearing the word “haven” in its title.

When a kid, clearly in a situation of not merely imminent threat, but apparently pre-existing abuse turns to it for help she is greeted with nothing but a landscape of “safe haven” failure.

***

As a final note, since this would apparently mean two separate kids, the girl and her baby, were attempted “havens” on Tuesday, I guess I now sadly need to revise my count up by one. To date the total number of kids who have in some way interacted with the dump law, whether counted by Nebraska DHHS or not, now stands at 24.

Repeal the dump laws.

***

As I posted back on September 25th:

Nebraska has finally realized it’s in over its head.

They opened the floodgates by passing the most egregious legalized child abandonment law in the country, a law that allowed children up to age 19 to be dumped. The kids can be dumped for any reason, by anyone who has bodily custody of them.

Some of us Bastards wrote at the time what an incredibly bad idea this was, and that it was simply a matter of time before Nebraska found older kids being dumped.

Almost a month later, the numbers have done nothing but rise since I first posted that.

So let’s go to this AP piece, Nebraska lawmakers agree on safe-haven age limit that has hit within the past 24 hours.

Stung by the abandonments of children as old as 17 under Nebraska’s brand-new safe-haven law, the governor and lawmakers agreed Monday to narrow the law’s broad wording to protect only the parents of newborns from prosecution.

Forty of the Legislature’s 49 senators would amend the law so it applies only to infants up to 3 days old, legislative Speaker Mike Flood said at a news conference. The age cap would change the Nebraska law from the most lenient to one of the nation’s most restrictive.

As I predicted, Nebraska appears to have decided to go to dump law 2.0, the aged down version. Nebraska will still be encouraging child abandonment, just of kids too young to protect their own interests, or speak about the experience of being dumped for some years.

That does not mean these soon to be aged down dumps are less damaging.

Aging down still does nothing about so many of the core problems with the dump laws, parental rights being violated when one parent dumps and the other is out of the loop, the Indian Child Welfare Act violations, the real needs of families, and most importantly, the needs of the dumped kids themselves.

But aging down will ensure that 18 year gap between when a kid is dumped and when they hit age of majority, thus sparing the legislators, but not the kids.

If all the Nebraska legislators do is age down to version 2.0, they’ve sidestepped many issues of substance relating to the dump laws to do mere superficial tinkering, or as I put it, change the shade of lipstick on the pig.

The pig’s still there. It’s a ticking time bomb, that as more dumps happen under the new rules and the dumped kids grow older, a whole new set of problems are slowing going to become apparent, though odds are, just as in other states, they will be dismissed as ‘personal problems’ not problems inherent to the system the dump laws create.

Governor Heineman has been hinting all along that this aging down was what was going to be done to the law:

The Nebraska law has had “serious, unintended consequences,” Gov. Dave Heineman said. “This law needs to be changed to focus on infants.”

The governor reiterated that he would prefer not to call a special session before the Legislature’s regular session in January. But he indicated he could change his mind.

“If circumstances dictate, particularly if we have several more from out of state, I won’t hesitate to make that call” for a special session, Heineman said.

Should Heineman not call a special session, Flood said, lawmakers would quickly change the law, probably within the first couple weeks of the session.

Meanwhile, dump law advocate so called “national expert”s like Tim Jaccard, are rapidly trying to distance other state’s dump laws from the Nebraska older child dumps/child welfare experimentation:

A national expert on safe-haven laws commended Nebraska officials for moving to impose an age limit, but he said action should be taken now to prevent older children from receiving the scars of abandonment.

“It affects children,” said Tim Jaccard, president of the National Safe Haven Alliance. “When children are older they have the ability to understand what’s going on and they’re thinking, ‘Mommy and Daddy don’t want me anymore, so they’re throwing me in a hospital.’ That’s a psychological blow.”

So apparently as long as the kids themselves are not old enough to cognize the act of being dumped at the time, Jaccard is fine with state encouraged abandonment. This is beyond short sighted. Just because a child does not remember the act of being dumped itself that hardly means they will not live with all the complexities of have been abandoned for the rest of their lifetimes.

The “psychological blows” may actually be WORSE in that they have no direct memory of the event. For some adoptees, early life events grow to near mythic proportions, purely due to the lack of information and the mind attempting to fill those gaps.

Further, most states dumps laws are not merely the aged down versions, they also are based upon anonymous abandoners, thereby permanently depriving the infants, (eventual kids, eventual adults) of any way to trace back to their origins, a permanent destruction of identity, culture and heritage.

The “psychological” blows of most states’ dump laws go far beyond mere abandonment to unequal treatment under law for a class of people. People permanently deprived of information other citizens take for granted, all due to the state encouragement of abandonment.

But Nebraska? Even if they age down and maintain identified dumpers, these infants/kids/adults are going to be dealing with gaps in their information not dissimilar to other adoptees. Even in teen dumps we’ve seen a lack of basic medical information being transmitted across in some cases.

I’m loathe to make the medical argument, as no added medical history form is going to fix what dump laws do.

It is important to point out though, the state has created a process whereby a class subclass of people, (not all dumped kids, but some dumped kids,) are permanently deprived of the medical information necessary to make decisions throughout their lives. That lack of information can mean the difference between life and death.

But let’s go back and talk about Tim Jaccard himself. It’s time to talk about who some of these people who push dump laws are.

Legalized abandonment organizations across the country (many of which are best described as kitchen table organizations) run hotlines. On the other end of those calls lies a process for dumping, with people like Jaccard sometimes in the middle of such.

Under the dump laws a womyn gives birth, likely in secret, perhaps unattended, if she survives, the resulting newborn is then to be taken to a hospital.

Jaccard, far beyond mere dump law advocate has been deeply involved in making abandonments happen himself, an intrinsic part of them. In People magazine back in 2003, he admitted to assisting in secret births, once in Central Park and “once in a girl’s bedroom while her parents slept down the hall. “

Yes, that means a hidden pregnancy, Jaccard assisting the secret birth, while the girl’s parents were asleep in the same house. Then the baby being “safe havened”.

Does this sound like the kind of law that fosters good interfamily communication?

Do you think that those parents ever learned of their daughter’s secret pregnancy, or the middle aged man prowling around their house that night making the resultant baby just go away?

Jaccard and others like him are what lie on the other end of the dump laws. They are the practical application of the dump laws.

These laws encourage womyn to give birth outside hospital settings.

They provide nothing for a womyn’s health, she’s expendable. It’s all about getting the kid.

Which is not the least bit surprising considering the history of how “safe havens” grew in part out of the adoption industry.

As for the National Safe Haven Alliance, (NSHA) they, and the National Council for Adoption (NCFA) (founded by Bill Pierce, see my earlier piece which explains how Pierce, NCFA, the dump laws and Nebraska are all pieces of the same “Safe haven” puzzle) are deeply entwined. The National Council for Adoption is what I would term an anti-adoptee organization, a trade and lobbying organization, created by the adoption industry to preserve sealed records.

Marley Greiner on her blog Bastardette, has been doing ongoing reporting on all the “safe haven” organizations, the personalities behind them, and their organizational ties. Here, for example is just one post discussing a National Safe Haven Alliance fundraiser and how joined at the hip NSHA has been to NCFA:

According to incorporation papers filed with the Virginia Secretary of State, Tom Atwood, president and CEO of NCFA is NSHA’s president and registered agent. The alliance’s principal office is 225 N. Washington St, Alexandria, VA–NCFA headquarters. The invitation to the fundraiser was went out on NCFA letterhead.

Legalized dump laws are about a steady supply of infants for adoption, in most states relatively paperfree, with no ‘pesky birthparents’ likely to show up at some later date. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the dump laws has happened at the exact same time as declining international adoptions.

I don’t know how to say this any more clearly, legalized abandonment laws,

• are anti-womyn,
• they are anti-kid,
• they are anti-adoptee,
• they are anti-family,
• they are anti-tribal,
• they are anti-public health,
• anti-best practices in child welfare,
• and at their core, a reversal of any notion of sane public policy.

They ultimately come down to ends justifies the means. So what if a womyn dies after secret childbirth, the newborn was “safe havened”.

And mere aging down, only creates a new set of problems.

Then again, I suppose Nebraska legislators can just ignore the real experts on legalized child abandonment AGAIN and watch as a new set of casualties add up.

We may have to wait 18 years for some voices to come to the fore, but trust me, infants don’t like being abandoned any more than teens do.

***

I want to point readers at an older (approximately October 16th?) Nebraska news segment I feel is important and have been meaning to blog about.

It’s a piece about genuine child abandonment. Not the “safe haven” laws. But as some insist upon utilizing it as an opportunity to talk about thier law, let’s talk about the failures of such in relation to genuine abandonments in Nebraska.

The segment shows how kids are yes, still being left, abandoned and on on their own in Nebraska, “safe-haven” law or no.

This (poorly titled, insinuating a direct connection, when the connection is abandonment, not the use of the law) piece, Home Alone Over Safe Haven, discusses two Nebraska kids (11 and 12 years old) left in an apartment to “fend for themselves” while their mother left for Kentucky supposedly in search of a new apartment.

Go read the full piece and watch the video for full details.

At the beginning of the video piece local reporter Dave Roberts opines,

“It’s an illegal choice in a state that offers safe haven.”

This is again, part of that (reproductive) “choice” false meme I have commented upon before being falsely applied to (post birth) children. Abandoning one’s kids like this is not in any way akin to any form of “reproductive choice,” nor are so called “safe havens.”

Both deal with actual (born) children, with their own constitutional rights.

Legalized abandonment advocates have desperately attempted to conflate the issue, particularly in relation to their school curriculum based presentations in other states. Wherein baby-dump advocates offer up legalized abandonment to young womyn as some form of third choice added to “abortion or adoption.” (And yes, even “abortion or adoption” is an intentional conflation, as womyn have only two options before birth, abort or bear to term. Relinquishing for adoption or parenting the child themselves are post birth parenting decisions, not reproductive decisions.)

Naturally, right on cue, legalized child abandonment advocate and Nebraska bill creator and sponsor Arnie Stuthman jumped the opportunity. Rather than admitting the outright failures of his law in this particular case, he instead attempted to capitalize upon it, essentially claiming that to his mind, it shows how allegedly necessary his law was. This is the strangest twist on sore winner-ism yet. The dump law advocates get what they want, they get their laws passed and then with every instance of children still being abandoned or still turning up dead, they insist their law is more necessary than ever.

For those of us who have tracked the dump laws play out state after state, we’ve watched variations on this scenario play out again and again. The more it fails, the more dump advocates dig their fingernails in.

Five days later, police still can’t find mom and the senator who wrote Nebraska’s safe haven law wonders why this woman, didn’t take advantage of it.

Senator Arnie Stuthman says, “We’re so concerned about the welfare of these children and that’s why we put this safe haven law there; although it was mainly meant for the babies and the people that could be harmed, but these too could drastically be harmed because they have nowhere to go. No where to get food.”

What both State Senator Stuthman and the local reporter fail to understand is that the mother in question was probably not the type to use the law in the first place, as using it would have meant the likely loss of her parental rights permanently.

We may very well be looking at what is really more of a child care issue, not a “safe haven” issue.

The “cost” of accessing child care must not be one’s parental rights.

Let’s look at two possibilities here.

In possibility one, (giving her the benefit of the doubt,) to her mind, she may have viewed the entire situation as temporary, sort of an “I’ll go on ahead, then come back for them.” If she did not intend to lose her kids, what she was looking for was sort of a temporary way to hit pause.

Dump laws only provide one option, loss of custody, likely permanent loss of parenthood and decision making power relating to her kids. Apparently (again, giving her the benefit of the doubt) she wanted to retain control. The dump laws do not give parents that power.

Many parents are merely looking for a time out, a place for the kids while they do what they need to do. But with the dumps laws, it’s all or nothing.

She may have viewed leaving them behind temporarily as preferable to “abandoning” them. She may not cognize herself as an “abandoner.”

(After all, what kind of mother intentionally abandons her own kids?)

On the other hand, let’s look at the second possibility here, let’s say she really was leaving for good, leaving the kids once and for all. Again, despite the local media blitz the Nebraska law has created, she did not use the law. Even if she intended to simply walk out, she did not take the kids to a dump site.

The kind of people the dump laws are often most intended for are often those least likely to utilize it.

Kids coming in through the dump sites are often well cared for, some come with personal items or even a suitcase. Often the parents or guardians show deep sorrow and remorse. That is a very different profile than those who simply walk away. Those who take the time to take the kids to dump sites tend to be those not in some process of “walking out.”

To date, we have no evidence that any of the kids abandoned were in any genuine immediate danger.

Yet the kids most in genuine danger are those who are left nowhere near dump sites, (again despite the media blitz.)

The dumps are catching kids whose parents care deeply and are looking for alternatives. For those not looking for alternatives, for those who just walk away, no dump law in the country is going to help.

As for the kids themselves,

Police put both children in protective custody. If detectives find mom, she could face criminal charges.

Which leads into another of the many unanswered questions about dump laws, are parents who abandon after the dump laws being sentenced more harshly than before the dump laws were passed because the state now views them as having rejected the state created “alternative?” Do judges who over time become frustrated with the laws not working sentence more harshly?

There’s a dissertation in there somewhere for anyone who wants to do the legwork.

***

No blogger could begin to keep up with the mess Nebraska legislators have made. Instead, this post will focus on some of the raw sources dealing with the recent dumps. I’ll slide in a little commentary, but mainly I urge readers to go look at the articles and the videos in my links, they spell out a long sad story of failure. But then when it comes to the dump laws there’s rarely any good news, for the kids anyway.

Here is an Omaha World-Herald round up of many of the recent stories they’ve done relating to the dumps and the aftermath. Lots of links, well worth the read.

As but one example, see their Oct 9th story, Grandmother: Help, not haven, sought for boy which details how one of the kids abandoned was supposedly never intended to be such:

An Omaha grandmother says she wanted to hospitalize her suicidal 12-year-old grandson — not use the safe haven law — when she asked the boy’s aunt Sunday to take him to Immanuel Medical Center.

But instead of receiving help, the boy was placed in a foster home. He is scheduled to move to a group home this weekend.

And the grandmother has been ordered to show up in court next Wednesday for reasons she says she doesn’t understand.

That her grandson is considered a safe haven case is a “misunderstanding,” the woman said.

Regardless of the intent behind each and every single dump, one thing remains perfectly clear, Nebraska’s law is for the first time putting America’s catastrophically broken child welfare system on display while simultaneously putting a spotlight on many of the problems inherent to the legalized child abandonment laws. Additionally, due to the age problems unique to Nebraska’s law, this is all playing out upon kids old enough to remember every sorry detail of it.

But EVEN IF THEY COULDN’T, THE DAMAGE ABANDONMENT DOES TO KIDS, THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THEY WERE ABANDONED, AND THAT THE STATE ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED THEIR ABANDONMENT is still a lifelong betrayal. Child abandonment produces scars time doesn’t heal.

The dump laws make a mockery of any notion of child welfare best practices. Nebraska is merely the most visible and extreme example thereof. By creating the non-anonymous and aged-up version of the laws Nebraska put the full ugliness of the dump laws on international display.

Now that we begin to see the full horror of these legal atrocities there’s only one thing left to do, REPEAL them.

One by one, state after state, pull these abominations back out of the code.

Which brings us to the Michigan boy dumped by his mother in Nebraska, make that adoptive mother, because you see, he was an adoptee.

The Michigan to Nebraska dump was not only a ‘teach you a lesson’ dump, it was also a ‘returns department’ dump. An adopted kid, no longer wanted by his adopters.

Teri, left, and Terrence Martin of Southfield, Mich., the adoptive parents of a 13-year-old boy abandoned in Nebraska under that state’s safe haven law.

(AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

I’m not going to get into every twist and turn of the Mess from Michigan, but I’ll provide a few links worth looking through.

October 13th-

Video from CBS 3 in Omaha (see * below)- Michigan Mom Drops off Son Under Safe Haven. While local news stations are calling it “safe haven crisis” Nebraska politicians still aren’t getting the message.

The video piece includes parts of an interview with State Sen. Brad Ashford:

We passed the law to protect Nebraska children. We didn’t pass the law to protect children from other states.

and

I don’t think it’s a crisis. I, again, it’s not a bad thing that children are being protected.

While Sen. Ashford may personally characterize being abandoned in the Nebraska’s ‘returns department’ as “being protected” there are at this point a number of kids who have actually been through the process who may have a bone to pick with him. Kids like this pregnant 14 year-old girl abandoned through the Nebraska system who had this to say about being dumped:

“I don’t want anything to happen to kids like it happened to me, …”

(She has since been returned to her home.)

October 14th-

Let’s start back here with New Details On Safe Haven Child From Michigan. Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine,

… also says the state of Nebraska is not going to take in children from all over the country. He plans to work with child protective services in Michigan to send this kid back, while at the same time making sure the child is in good hands.

(Never mind the fact that the Nebraska law says nothing about ‘no out of state dumps allowed!’ The way the law is written it’s a free for all, anyone with physical custody can dump a kid, be that domestic or even international!)

The AP did a piece, the morning of the 14th, (this by way of WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan) Local Mom Abandons Teen in Nebraska. (Also see related video on upper right hand corner.) Once again, we see a kid not in any immediate danger-

There was no sign the boy was in immediate danger before he was abandoned early Monday, but an investigation into the boy’s situation was still continuing, Landry said.

A second piece, also from WXYZ, Michigan Mom Who Abandoned Son Identified.

KETV- Court Docs Reveal Story Behind Latest Safe Haven Case This piece goes into just a bit more detail about the ‘teach ‘em a lesson’ aspect of this dump and makes clear, the adoptive mother never intended to actually lose custody of him:

Martin told workers she would come back to get her son and now her son would know she wasn’t kidding.

As to the Judge’s comments in this piece, I don’t think loss family bonds should ever be the ‘cost’ of gaining access to support systems or mental health care. Everything he discusses in this piece can be done WITHOUT the state legalizing child abandonment.

October 15th-

Omaha World Herald-

Michigan boy left at Omaha hospital to stay in Nebraska – for now

and Michigan mother may have used safe haven law as lesson which includes:

“She told hospital staff that since local police were included she would just come back to get (her son), since now he would realize she wasn’t kidding anymore,” the affidavit says.

Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services officials confirmed that the mother had second thoughts about leaving her son. But once a child is left under the law and the state has taken custody, parents or guardians lose their right to make decisions about what happens to the child.

WXYZ, Michigan Mom who Abandoned Son Identified also see video.

October 16th-

KCBY (Oregon), Parents of Mich. boy left in Neb. lose custody.

Three Faux/Fox Detroit links, the first two are AP stories;

Court: Mom Who Abandoned Boy Can’t See Other Kids,

Official: Mich. Mom Neglected Boy She Left in Neb.,

and Children Taken from Mother Who Abandoned Son.

According to the video segment, on the third piece, the adopters were receiving (federal) adoption subsidies for the two kids to the tune of $900 a month. The adopters had apparently “tried for years” to get rid of their two adopted kids.

Note that once again, the adoption subsidies mess that I’ve already blogged about in relation to the dump laws is right in the middle of all this.

Also see, Michigan Prosecutors Don’t Want Mom to Use Nebraska Safe Haven Again

The grandmother said good-bye to the boy before his mother drove to Omaha. She left him Monday morning at the hospital with a packed suitcase and a ten dollar bill. Grandmother says, “She was taking him to a boys’ home that’s what she said a place to take boys with problems.” the grandmother says the boy’s been trouble and they tried to get help for years.

But the Michigan prosecutor found a report from 1999 accusing the mother of burning the boy with a curling iron. For some unknown reason, the state dropped the investigation.

This last bit is particularly important, it implies Michigan dropped the ball long before the dump in Nebraska. Which is to say, this may very well have been an abandonment that never would have happened had there been intervention back at the point where the adopted kid was accused of being burned by his adoptive mother.

All of which points back at the larger problems involved in follow up post placement for adoptees and how over and over again, these kids are simply left to suffer while the adopters collect the federal checks.

Oct 17th

AP by way of CNN- Parents who left teen under safe haven law lose custody

The report said Terri Martin told Nebraska officials that she took the boy there to “scare him,” yet she denied incidents of aggression.

It also said state records showed evidence that neither parent wanted the 13-year-old, who was adopted along with his 10-year-old brother.

AP by way of Faux/Fox Detroit, Court Grants State Temporary Custody of 4 Children

The report also cited a history of referrals to child-welfare officials because of reports of injuries to the teen. Carley is seeking to eliminate the Martins’ parental rights over the 13-year-old. The next court hearing is Nov. 7.

“We think there are some possibilities they could learn to parent the other three safely,” Carley said.

Nebraska has agreed to drop jurisdiction over the teen and let Michigan help him.

Yeah, that would be the Michigan child-welfare system that has apparently already failed him spectacularly. But right back in he goes, ’cause Nebraska doesn’t want him either. This is a kid who has been abandoned not merely by his adopters, but by every state tasked with helping him.

If there was an ongoing history of injuries to the kid, I ask again, what was the deal on his placement? If the adopters were receiving subsidies that would usually mean they took in an older child or sibling group or ’special needs’ kid out of the foster care system. If he was interacting with the system repeatedly due to injuries and burns, who was the person or agency responsible for keeping him with this set of adopters?

Just dumping the kid back into the broken Michigan system ‘disapears’ him right back in.

If Nebraska was at all serious about ’saving’ kids, they might not be so quick to hand over jurisdiction.

But that’s not what Nebraska’s dump law is about. Clearly.

Getting him and his siblings away from the adopters is one thing, getting him away from the system that sent him right back to those adopters after injuries and burns is apparently quite another.

Be sure to see the video piece related to this link, as there are many new details in it, including allegations of the boy having endured sexual abuse.

More video, (again see below *) New Details in Michigan Safe Haven Case, The piece details the adopters charged in Michigan with abuse and neglect.

They claim the boy was abandoned in Nebraska after being advised to do so by a therapist and that his adopters…

…tried to find him a new home again and again.

So once again we have a ‘therapist’ whatever that might mean and whatever qualifications that might entail, telling the guardians to use the dump law.

State Sen. Stuthman (the longtime supporter and sponsor of the Nebraska dump law) wants her prosecuted in Michigan to send a message to the rest of the country.

The ‘message’ of course being that no matter how broadly the Nebraska law was written, everyone involved is now shitting bricks at the prospect of hoards of dumpers crossing state lines to bring their potential dumplings to Nebraska. Gee, usually that’s the kind of thing one might want to think about BEFORE such gets signed into law.

So now we’ve got legalized child abandonment/ ’safe haven’ advocates like State Senator Stuthman trying to close the barn door long after the fact.

It’s important to keep in mind that Sen. Stuthman and other such advocates are precisely who and what got Nebraska into this mess in the first place, all based upon their blind insistence that Nebraska ‘needed’ such a law.

Hint, no kid ever NEEDS to be abandoned.

Also note,

… the court papers outline how the family tried to give back the troubled boy since he was four even going to the birthmother.

This is interesting as it means the adopters had some form of access to the original mother.

(Nebraska) DHHS News Release Safe Haven Youth Returns to Michigan

Also importantly, NPR has a five minute All Things Considered piece, Neb. Safe Haven Law Draws More Than Infants, along with links to past stories about the Nebraska disaster.

It goes into detail about some of the kids themselves reactions to being dumped, describing the extreme duress this law is putting some of the kids through.

October 18th-

Omaha World-Herald, Teen to go home, but state will have custody

Oakland County, Mich., prosecutors are seeking temporary custody of four of the 13-year-old’s siblings still living at home. Deb Carley, the county prosecutor, said an investigation found that the parents had neglected all their children.

Well, mission accomplished, eh?

Right back into the system that didn’t think his adopters were bad enough to warrant losing him prior to the dump.

But Nebraska understands the precedent that would be set by accepting even one out of state dump, so ‘what best for the kid’ be damned. Quick! Get ‘em on a plane!

I can’t wait to see what his next digs are going to be like, foster care? Group home? Think the siblings will get to stay together?

Yeah, well, somehow I doubt wherever Michigan decides to park him until he ages out will be making CNN anytime soon.

This boy is dumped alright.

Nebraska’s washed its hands of him and the odds of him finding ‘a loving adoptive home’ back in Michigan aren’t looking so hot.

* FINALLY-

I’m having some difficulty linking the individual videos, but you can use the search feature on the homepage of CBS 3 news in Omaha to pull up the video links, just search by the video segment names:

Michigan Mom Drops off Son Under Safe Haven 10/13/08 6:44pm

Michigan Boy Latest Safe Haven Drop-Off 10/13/08 11:48pm

Safe Haven Case in Michigan Reveals Child in Trouble 10/14/08 11:44pm

New Details in Michigan Safe Haven Case 10/17/08 6:55pm

***

I suppose the next question should be how many more kids, unwanted, adopted, or otherwise are going to be taken on 12 hour or more car rides to be dumped by those who have physical custody of them?

If Nebraska legislators think this is “not a crisis” perhaps that has more to do with it not being a crisis for them.

For the kids, they can’t wait until January for the Nebraska legislature to step up and begin to tackle (or perhaps if they have the courage, ‘undo’ to the extent they can going forward) the crisis they created.

They can’t wait while legislators hem and haw and contemplate the possibilities.

They need an end to legalized abandonments.

And they need it now.

To date 21 kids have undergone some form of abandonment in Nebraska, even if NE DHHS only formally counts 18 of them (link opens a PDF), (see my earlier blogging on the numbers game being played here.) That’s 21 kids who would not have had to endure the turmoil of being abandoned but for the short sighted and ill-advised actions of the Nebraska legislature.

At what point do they finally recognize their little social experiment is causing harm to the kids?

What will it take before legislators finally show some spine and put an end to the mess they’ve created?

Legalized child abandonment laws need to be REPEALED. Period. No state should ever be in the business of actively encouraging child abandonment.

The kids can’t wait another day, …another hour, …another minute.

Only Nebraska legislators hold the power to put a stop to this, it’s long past time they realized their mistake and worked to prevent further damage.

As for the 21 kids already enduring the effects of this legislation, they’ll be living with it the rest of their lives.

For each and every one of them, trust me on this, I think they’d be the first to tell you, it was absolutely a point of crisis.

A crisis they will be enduring the consequences of from now on.

***

Before even starting to write about this topic, keep in mind the disclaimer I’ve placed upon earlier writings I’ve done in relation to First Nations peoples and adoption:

To start from a personal perspective, I’m just a Bastard, a politically active adoptee.

Being legally prohibited from attaining my State sealed records, I have no idea what heritage cultural or genetic my biological family might contain, other than a quick glance in a mirror appears to indicate pretty clearly a hefty chunk of what would generally be termed “white” by sociological definition. The family history of those who adopted me has interwoven at times with First Nations peoples on both the American and Canadian sides of the border.

While my interest in this subject, yes at times does relate to aspects of ‘familial’ history, my primary interest in such is historical and political, speaking from both a Bastard perspective, as one who opposes forms and tactics of colonialism (religious, political, etc), and as one who supports indigenous peoples’ autonomy and demands for redress.

***

Ironically, the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA in relation to the dump laws was precisely what I had been intending to blog about, but hadn’t had the time to get to. Well sure enough, in Nebraska, we appear to have the first case(?) of an ICWA claim in the wake of a “safe haven” legalized abandonment.

…Channel 6 News found out Wednesday the Cherokee Nation based in Oregon may have a legal claim to raise the Staton kids because they are part Native American.

(Also be sure to see the video related to the piece.)

Why haven’t we had an ICWA dump related claim before now? Perhaps because in most states abandoners are anonymous and the abandoned kids are not old enough to answer questions relating to their genealogy.

(Again, ‘aging down’ will not ’solve’ these problems. Changing Nebraska’s dump law to apply only to infants would only create a new state-created ‘pocket’ in which to hide crucial information such as a child’s genealogical background, information vital to an ICWA claim. Adoptees in closed adoptions, such as myself actually know a great deal about that, as we have no means by which to determine any First Nations ancestry we may or may not have.)

While I have been working on a longer post about the nine kids Gary Staton abandoned back on September 24th, and the aftermath of that abandonment;

• how the kids have ended up at the heart of legal battles,
• having to make difficult choices between remaining with their friends at their school, or staying as a family unit with the other kids,
• how it has played out across multiple states,
• and how it has played out between family members and Nebraska Health and Human Services,

but for the moment I’m going to set that saga aside to focus solely on the ICWA angle.

Bastard Nation, The Adoptee Rights Organization warned about how the dump laws circumvent ICWA early on, pointing out that such laws:

Contravene sections of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) which give tribes first custody rights in cases of child relinquishment.

Bastard Nation has brought the issue up many times in testimony trying to stop the dump laws. State after state, in enacting their dump laws have disregarded their obligations under ICWA.

I have also pointed out that dump laws short circuit ICWA claims in my own previous blogging. (While this particular post I’ve linked is primarily relating to Canadian First Nations children, some of whom were later adopted by American couples, it’s an important read as backgrounder and context to the history of how First Nations children have been actively resettled into white families. Dump laws must be understood within the broader context of forcible child removal as a means by which to cut off Tribes’ futures.) Bastardette has also pointed out the ICWA violation in relation to Nebraska’s dump law.

As an aside, Shea Grimm in her search series has also written about ICWA’s pertinence to sealed records adoptees’ attempts to regain access to their own records, see her section Using The Indian Child Welfare Act in a petition. Unfortunately this often ends up in the catch-22 of having to first know about your Native ancestry to to gain the information relating to your Native ancestry. But then, there’s very little about adoption that is logical and straightforward.

The First Nations Orphan Association is an important voice relating to issues of First Nations kids and adoption . Again, bear in mind such adoptions were often done within a context of non-consentuality. Large numbers of Native children were forcibly removed for adoption. ICWA was in part a response to those crimes committed. But now with the baby Moses laws/”Safe Haven” laws/baby dump laws, a new means of bypassing ICWA has been constructed, once again undermining Tribal rights.

The legalized abandonment laws continue that history of permanently removing children from their Tribal or genealogical heritage, far more so for the infant dumps than Nebraska’s older child dumps, as at least these older kids have perhaps some knowledge of their heritage. The dump laws provide an adoption intake path, wherein certainly for infants, questions of Tribal legal claims are never even raised, doing so in flagrant violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act.

Tribes are not just ‘another player’ in the legal tug of war over kids, they are sovereign Nations. Cutting them out of the equation via the legalized abandonment laws is nothing more than once again creating a new way to circumvent their means to protect children’s identities and Tribal futures.

You want a four letter reason why legalized child abandonment laws must be REPEALED? ICWA.

Infant and anonymous dump laws are the bypass on ICWA.

Older child abandonments will only face ICWA challenges when Tribes have the resources and access to information to raise the claims, wrongly placing the burden of raising the claim on Tribes, rather than on the States who have obligations under ICWA.

Tinkering with age limits and other such details of these laws is not going to begin to deal with the fundamental flaws inherent to all dump laws.

Full REPEAL is the only answer.