(Photo courtesy of the Nebraska Unicameral Information Office)

This is the latest in a series of posts I have done criticizing Nebraska’s legalized child abandonment laws. You can find my earlier posts via my Nebraska tag.

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Nebraska has an incredible State Capitol, it’s a shame to see it used as the venue where the Nebraska Governor and Legislature are abandoning some of the state’s most needy kids.

Regular readers know, I oppose all legalized child abandonment laws, so while I’m going to detail the latest machinations relating to the ‘new and improved’ dump bills (what I’ve dubbed dump law 2.0) the bottom line remains, if any of these bills succeed, Nebraska will continue to fail those most vulnerable and least able to defend their own rights.

Today Nebraska’s Attorney General weighed in on the likely constitutionality (or lack thereof) regarding LB 3 (Annette Dubas’ two tier bill.)

Via Monday’s Nebraska Legislative Journal (link opens a PDF) we get the details on the Attorney General’s opinion on:

Whether LB 3 is within the scope of the Governor’s call for a special session of the Legislature relating to child abandonment.

Again, we’re deep down in the technical issues of what can and cannot be done within the scope of the special session itself. Back on November 14th (Friday) when LB 3 was introduced, Speaker Michael Flood requested an opinion from the Attorney General on LB 3.

The One-Hundredth Nebraska Legislature began its First Special Session on November 14, 2008. That special session was convened pursuant to a 44 LEGISLATIVE JOURNAL Proclamation issued by the Governor on October 29, 2008, under authority of art. IV, § 8 of the Nebraska Constitution. The Governor’s Proclamation called the Legislature into special session “for the purpose of considering and enacting legislation on only” two subjects. Those subjects are:

1. Enacting legislation to limit the application of 2008 Neb. Laws LB 157, Neb. Rev. Stat. § 29-121, by reducing the maximum age of children to whom the statute applies; and

2. To appropriate funds to the Legislative Council for the necessary expenses of the extraordinary session herein called.

Neb. Rev. Stat. § 29-121, the statute specifically addressed in the Governor’s proclamation, reads as follows:

No person shall be prosecuted for any crime based solely upon the act of leaving a child in the custody of an employee on duty at a hospital licensed by the State of Nebraska. The hospital shall promptly contact appropriate authorities to take custody of the child.

Your opinion request, which we received late in the afternoon on November 14, pertains to LB 3 from the First Special Session. You wish to know whether, in our view, LB 3 “is within the scope of the Governor’s call for a special session of the Legislature to enact legislation that limits the application of Neb. Rev. Stat. § 29-121?” For the reasons discussed below, we believe that it is not.

(Emphasis added.)

I’ll let readers go over the details of why via the Legislative Journal link if they are so inclined, suffice it to say, just as I predicted, to date the only real options the legislature has open to it is setting an age limit (again I advocate Zero point Zero, i.e. no kids at all) and how to pay for the special session.

Much of this opinion is based upon an earlier decision the Attorney General rendered:

This is the second opinion request which we have received regarding legislation proposed for the First Special Session and the scope of the Governor’s call. In our Op. Att’y Gen. No. 08008 (November 14, 2008), we indicated that legislation proposed by Senator Pahls was likely outside the scope of the Governor’s call for the special session.

Much of the first opinion is quoted in relation to LB 3 in the Legislative Journal piece. This paragraph summarizes:

It is well established that the legislature while in special session can transact no business except that for which it was called together. . . . The proclamation may state the purpose for which the Legislature is convened in broad, general terms or it may limit the consideration to a specified phase of a general subject. The Legislature is free to determine in what manner the purpose shall be accomplished, but it must confine itself to the matters submitted to it by the proclamation. . . .

Now how exactly the above relates to these three resolutions:

LR1 – Congratulate the Lindsay Holy Family High School Boys’ Cross Country Team for winning the Class D state championship

LR2 – Congratulate Thomas Wilson Hall for earning the rank of Eagle Scout

and

LR3 – Congratulate Matthew Willaert Wallen for earning the rank of Eagle Scout

is all just a bit beyond my legislative know-how, (but apparently when they’re not busy making yet still more of Nebraska’s abandoned kids they have to do something to fill the time and justify spending that $68,761.)

The Attorney General’s opinion also points out what he feels is beyond the constitutional scope of the special session, (speaking of the Governor):

He has not summoned the Legislature to consider and legislate with regard to other legal, medical or administrative ramifications that might flow from the relinquishment of a child at a licensed hospital or from the exemption from criminal prosecution itself.

and from further down:

…the supreme court’s restrictive view of what legislation is considered germane to a special session call does not allow the Legislature to consider bills which go beyond the specified phase of the Governor’s call and which deal in broad terms with child abandonment, the duties of governmental and private institutions, and the duties and rights of parents. Those additional legislative issues must wait, at this point, until the Legislature is assembled in its regular session.

Which has, just as I said, left their hands tied when it comes to offering any other form of concrete help to Nebraska’s kids and families.

The Nebraska Attorney General lays out very clearly, he believes LB 3:

…if enacted during the special session, is in violation of the Nebraska Constitution and void.

So where does this leave us?

Well for starters, with many hours of testimony that was heard Monday afternoon. (I’ll be working with that later on,) which was almost universally about at precisely what age Nebraska’s unequal treatment under law was going to kick in…2-3 days/that magic 72 hours? 30 days? A 2 month minimum? At 6-8 months? 1 year? 2 years?

As I’ve said before Zero point zero is the only way for Nebraska to ensure all kids receive “Equality Before the Law.” Anything else is an arbitrarily picked point in time that ensures a class of kids in Nebraska receive unequal treatment under Nebraska law.

Governor Heineman laid out his stance in a radio interview:

The governor said today that he’s flexible on an age limit and is willing to work with the legislature.

“Somewhere between 3 and 30 days is appropriate,” Heineman said on a statewide radio call-in show broadcast from KFOR in Lincoln.

So, again, where are we? For the moment anyway, stuck with LB 1, (the 72 hour bill) and the amendments that have been offered to date:

Sen. Bill Avery- AM 1- 1 year
Sen. Chris Langemeier- AM 2- 30 Days

Which is to say so far the legislators have accepted inequitable treatment, now they’re merely quibbling over the exact point that inequality will be applied.

We are still waiting for even one Nebraska legislator to step up and introduce a bill with an age cap set at zero point zero, a bill that would put a stop to the practice of child dumping in Nebraska.

The Attorney General’s opinion clearly leaves room for for a Zero point Zero bill:

Therefore, during the First Special Session, the Legislature may lower the maximum age of covered children to whatever age it chooses, or not at all.

(Emphasis added.)

In fact, given the current constraints of the special session, a Zero point Zero bill would be the ONLY means by which the legislature could effectively repeal the dump bill.

Unless and until that happens, we’re merely debating how many abandoned kids can dance on the head of that legalized dump pin.

A damn sad state of affairs, and one under which Nebraska’s kids will continue to lose.

***

All state enabled and encouraged legalized abandonment schemes fail kids.

Zero out the dump law.

***

I’ve been carefully studying the parameters of what can and cannot be done to the Nebraska dump law during the special session. If I read the Nebraska Special Session Legislative Journal first day summary (link opens a PDF) correctly, (and if their analysis on it is correct), then the legislature’s hands are in many ways tied.

Essentially, all they will be able to pass would be an age limitation on the pre-existing legalized child abandonment law. Programs to help older kids etc would apparently have to be considered separately in the upcoming session next January.

Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in defining the goal of the special session so narrowly, has made it all but impossible for state legislators to do anything until the regular session to actually help these families in need. No matter how much legislators want to tackle the problem and build solutions, the narrow definition apparently means nothing can be done in the special session.

That said, this then provides a genuine opportunity to finally decouple getting kids and families help from child abandonment. If there’s nothing that legislators can do in the special session other than tackle the age limit, then the best thing they can do is put an end to legalized child abandonment, take abandonment out of the equation all together as the ‘costs’ of even trying to get a kid help must never be the world they’ve known, their family, friends, school, and home.

But ultimately Kids and families are not getting the help they need with the legalized abandonment law, doubly so for the 12 “attempted abandonments” not even counted in the official Nebraska tabulation. For those 12 kids, they have been by and large shit-outta-luck, to the point of even being written out of the official history. For them, the Nebraska “haven” was anything but.

The very reason the law was passed in the first place was allegedly to protect kids in immediate danger, yet none of the kids surrendered were found to be in danger of immanent harm by Nebraska’s own DHHS.

Further, the existing law, as we’ve documented here in these blog posts in excruciating detail causes additional harm.

Rather than a second failed attempt at an aged down dump law, (a dump law 2.0) and a missed opportunity, it’s time for Nebraska legislators to take the lead. Join Washington D.C. in being a real haven for kids, where no children can be dumped legally.

Age the dump law down to 0.0.

Within the parameters the Governor has set out, that would be the closest in practice legislators could fashion to full, permanent repeal until January. It would put on the age cap the governor has mandated, but also stop the practice of legalized child dumping in Nebraska.

Any other age limit is arbitrary.

Some kids would be dumpable, some would not. (Just as currently, many arbitrary decisions are being made about which kids will be accepted and which are being rejected.)

Zero point zero is the only way for Nebraska to ensure all kids receive “Equality Before the Law”

ZeropointZero is the only way to be fair. It ensures all Nebraska’s children are treated equally.

Any other age limit artificially creates multiple tiers of differing treatment under Nebraska law.

Speaking as an adoptee from a State with multiple tiers of records access, I can explain in no uncertain terms what it means to be treated differently merely because my birthdate falls on an arbitrarily determined side of an artificially created line. It has meant living daily with the realities of unequal treatment under law.

What kids desperately need now is an advocate, a legislator willing to stand up for them and present a Zero point Zero bill.

As things currently stand in the special session, not one legislator has introduced any form of bill to end the practice of child dumping. The clock is ticking. As I’ve said over and over again, every single day a dump law is on the books is bad for kids.

How many more kids are going to have to undergo legalized abandonment before someone in a position to actually change their circumstances finally stands up to say “enough!”?

Worse, how many more kids are going to have to undergo legalized abandonment under dump law 2.0 as a result of an arbitrarily thrown together piece of legislation that was less than a week from introduction to being enacted?

Kids deserve better than abandonment, at any age.

Zero out the dump law!

***

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.

***

I’m going to work chronologically, (yet in inverse order from the Nebraska DHHS safe haven page’s latest press release.)

Firstly, there was another uncounted in the official tabulation dump the Sunday night:

In addition, there was a report that the safe haven law may have been used in Lincoln last night regarding an 18-year old. DHHS has investigated and confirmed with the Lancaster County Attorney’s Office that a juvenile petition will not be filed in this instance. As a result, Landry said DHHS does not consider this a use of the safe haven law, but is providing assistance to the young woman on a voluntary basis.

Once again, another 18-year old fell down the dump slot, 18 being that age that Nebraska won’t provide foster care etc to, nor count as an official dump, yet still legally classifies as a “child”, not yet an adult.

KCCI has a report, Another Teen Abandoned In Nebraska. She was another adoptee, “returns department” dump:

The woman told officials at BryanLGH Medical Center West that her daughter, who was adopted, is bipolar and has a learning disability, Assistant Police Chief Jim Peschong said Monday. The girl was left at the hospital at about 11 p.m.

“The adoptive mother says that the daughter refused to take some medication for some conditions that she has,” Peschong said. “She won’t listen to her, can’t control her.”

Marley/Bastardette has a post up about the incident as well, MORE NEBRASKA FIASCO: WOMAN ATTEMPTS TO DUMP ADOPTED DAUGHTER.

Her tabulation of the dumped adoptees, “returns department” dumps to date:

So far, one other dumpee has been confirmed as adopted, 2 others reported (but not confirmed) as kinship adopted. I believe there are more.

Then secondly, yesterday (Monday) morning, a 17 year old boy was abandoned. According to the Nebraska DHHS safe haven page’s latest press release, his mother left him off at Creighton University Medical Center. He is counted as the 30th officially counted dumped kid in the Nebraska DHHS count. (Link opens a PDF)

Both Marley and I have been tracking the number of kids not included in official Nebraska DHHS count as well. She’s found an additional 11 cases of what she’s terming “attempted dumps.”

So DHHS count aside, the kid-centric count, actually stands at at least 41.

As I’ve said before, mine is a Bastard blog. I care about what the kids themselves are experiencing. Some of the uncounted, “unofficially” dumped kids are every bit as separated from the world they once knew as any other counted dumped kid, they just don’t match the state’s dumper criteria or age limit criteria.

Some are self “haven” cases wherein the kids themselves have reached out for help, only to find no “haven” on the other end.

Those 11, roughly 1/4 of all the Nebraska dump cases are rendered invisible. The kids are treated as mere ghosts in the machine, the memories of their dumps kept alive only by those of us who continue to insist, they are no less dumped, they are no less in need.

Yet as Nebraska legislators gather to age down to the next version of dump law failure, a Nebraska dump law 2.0, a full quarter of the cases, a quarter of the dumped kids, will likely never even be considered, because they don’t apparently count.

***

Repeal the dump laws now.

***

Friday an 11 year old girl was left by her mother at Bergan Mercy Hospital. NE DHHS counts her as the 29th kid in the official count.

Be sure to see A Mother’s Story of Trying to Get Help. Note that the girl was originally going to go into an adoption:

The mother in Nebraska’s most recent Safe Haven case speaks out about why she dropped off her eleven year old daughter. It’s another story of a parent who tried to get help, but instead ran into roadblocks.

…

“She was originally supposed to go up for adoption. We were living in Minnesota, I was a young single mother.” Another family was ready to adopt the newborn and take her in, but the girl’s grandmother stepped in.

Once again we come back to what sits in the middle of these cases, guardians feel the only way they can get these kids help is to use the dump laws. The cost of getting a kid the help they need should never be loss of their family. One should not have to surrender parental or guardian rights to gain access to the services necessary to get a kid what they need.

Marley’s got a post up about her, along with updates on both the Indiana and Michigan dump cases.

Also on Friday the full court press media circus kicked in as everyone gears up for the special session.

The lip-flapping-to-fill-the-space-between-the-commericials “Dr. Phil” television show did an hour long dump supportive promo (be sure to catch his “uncensored” commentary here in which he sings the praises of leglaized child abandonment. ) My comment on both the Laura the moralizing hypocrite (link not suitable for minors or workplace reading) insipid blog post and Phil-the-shill show that Marley pointed her readers at can be found here.

Again, I couldn’t make stuff like this up. We are so far into the realm of whacked out fiction I couldn’t write characters like this if I tried. Supposedly “pro-family” morons singing the praises of child dumping, through the looking glass we go.

If you had told me 20 years ago that I would be sitting here, having to explain to people that abandoning children is never a good thing, I never would have believed you. These are things I used to consider self-evident.

But once this latest crop of dump-abandonment propagandists got involved people began to loose track of which way is up and which way is down.

Hint;

• kids not being abandoned=good,
• abandoning kids=bad.
• State enabled and encouraged legalized child dumping=bad, very bad.

Meanwhile back in the real world the Omaha World-Herald had two good pieces today, The Children: Kids suffer sense of abandonment and The Parents: Myth aside, caretakers stay involved. Readers should go take the moment to go across and read the articles.

Once again, up through the cracks we barely hear the actual voice of a dumped kid:

One 12-year-old safe haven boy has posted this message on his MySpace page:”**choose me** Im so damn lonley.”

Finally, see Safe Haven Revision Set for Next Friday.

The law tweeks are on the horizon. Practically guaranteeing that the next set of ‘aged down’ kids will continue to deal with all the problems dump laws create under dump law 2.0.

Meanwhile the demand for full repeal continues on, apparently unheeded.

I don’t want to be sitting here in 6 months having to say “we told you so” all over again, I want the states to stop manufacturing still more dump-related ordeals.

As for the kids already dumped, the damage is done. They’ll be living with such the rest of their lives, unlike certain legislators (in any given state) who simply can, and do, walk away from the messes they made.

***

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been busy the last week or so. While I’ve certainly still been following the latest twists and turns in the Nebraska situation, I haven’t had much time to actually write. Tonight is no exception.

I did however want to point readers across to two critically important pieces Marley has done on her blog, Bastardette:

CHILDREN OF THE CORN: NEBRASKA’S DUMPED GENERATION Saturday, November 01, 2008

and

MEET #25, #26, AND MAYBE #27–AND THAT PESKY 18- YEAR OLD: THE NEBRASKA FIASCO CONTINUES Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Since I last blogged on Oct 29th, even the official Nebraska DHHS count (link opens a PDF) has gone up to 27 kids dumped to date.

But as I’ve been pointing out for some time now, there are a number of situations under which kids have interacted with the law not tabulated in the official count. (Again see my earlier explanations, here and here, of some of those unoffical interactions.)

Marley pointed her readers at an important article, bringing up the plight of the self “havening” boy from Grand Island who has, sure enough, fallen through the cracks. As he was deemed “too old” and as he turned himself over, he is not counted among the official cases (He’s not in the Nebraska DHHS count.)

She saw the gap most recently when she housed the Grand Island teen, who in September, attempted to turn himself in at St. Francis Medical Center under the safe-haven law.

He was over the age of 17 and wasn’t turned in by a parent, so didn’t qualify to enter the Health and Human Services system, Schwan said.

He stayed in her home with Schwan and her family for three weeks, while Schwan tried unsuccessfully to find him placement in various community service programs.

and

Schwan said Grand Island’s safe haven teen was told to leave home by his mother’s boyfriend, had lived for more than a year with his grandmother in an area storage unit and has been in four high schools over the past four years.

“He just wants to finish school,” she said.

Kids like him need a safe place to go — even just temporarily, Schwan said.

The bottom line is, despite attempting to “safe haven” himself, he isn’t even listed among the cases.

Kid after kid is going through the system, some are counted, others like the boy from Grand Island are not.

Yet when legislators go to “fix” their broken law do you think they will even hear about the plight of these kids? They’re nowhere in the stats. They’re off the books. They may as well not even have every existed when it comes to the official stats in relation to the Nebraska legalized child abandonment law.

It’s come down to those of us on the outside to even remind people that kids like this are part of the history of the miserably failed child welfare social experiment in Nebraska.

Despite what the kids are undergoing day in and day out, Nebraska lawmakers and Governor Heineman apparently appear to feel no great urgency to try to deal with the mess of their own creation.

Instead they’ve offered up a ‘compromise’ a mere tweek to the law, offering it up as some kind of “solution”, (or at least a means of getting the attention to shift and die down.) Their inaction and lack of a genuine solution only continues to ensure the kids themselves are the ones who will suffer the consequences of such.

(By way a side notation for new readers, I’ve already explained how the plan to age down Nebraska’s dump law to infants 3 days old or less is no solution to the problem. I’ve taken to referring to such as dump law 2.0. From a genuine child welfare stance their short sighted “solution” is dead on arrival. Kids will continue to endure the harm all dump laws cause, but as the kids will be infants not teens they will be less likely to be able to vocalize the problems they will face until years later.)

***

As always, I continue to call for nothing short of full repeal of all legalized child abandonment laws.

With a little luck, I’ll be back to blogging in more detail very soon.

***

Ironically, just as the excrement really hits the fan, I find myself least able to carve out time for more than this bare bones blogging at the moment.

That said, I’ll write what little I do have time for.

Here are the latest sad additions to the Nebraska dump law casualty count:

• Oct 25th- 12-year old boy from Georgia
• Oct 27th- 15-year old girl
• Oct 28th- 17 year old boy and 15-year old girl.

To my count, this brings the total number of kids who have in some way interacted with the dump law to date, whether counted by Nebraska DHHS or not, to 28. (Again see my earlier explanations, here and here, of how I’ve reached this number.)

By way of providing some detail, Marley Greiner on her blog, Bastardette has been picking up some of the Nebraska blogging over the last few days, particularly relating to the GA abandonment:

Sunday, October 26, 2008

GEORGIA ON MY MIND: ANOTHER OUT-OF-STATE DUMP

Monday, October 27, 2008

GEORGIA ON MY MIND MORNING UPDATE

NEBRASKA SAFE HAVEN: HERDING CATS

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

ON NO! ANOTHER ONE! NEBRASKA FIASCO AD NAUSEAUM

No doubt she will have more as events unfold.

Then today, Nebraska’s Governor Heineman called for a special session (link opens a PDF) of the currently out of session legislature. (Note that some of these legislators would not be around in January when the regular session begins due to being term limited out.) The session is scheduled to begin Friday November 14th.

The revised version of the dump law, what I’ve been referring to as dump bill 2.0 would limit Nebraska’s dump window to infants three days old or younger.

I’ve already written repeatedly about how a 2.0 bill would fail to address the core problems inherent to all dump laws. Take this, from a post I wrote back on Oct 21 (Nebraska attempts to slam to barn door, only creating a new set of problems) when the “agreement” was initially announced:

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 slowly 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.

For those of us who genuinely care about the state of child welfare in Nebraska, and want to see the state cease its encouragement of legalized child abandonment, we now appear to have just over 2 weeks to encourage Nebraska legislators to come to understand the inherent flaws in even an ‘aged down’ version of a dump law, and instead encourage them to embrace the full repeal position.

Nothing less than full repeal of Nebraska’s encouragement of child abandonment will help these kids.

It’s past time to detangle any version of a dump bill from what needs to be a second bill supporting access to for example increased access to mental health care and genuine support for families in crisis.

Repeal the dump law once and for all, then set about doing the difficult job of creating a genuine and meaningful safety net for kids and their families.

Entangling these two separate issues, legalized child abandonment and access to programs for families in crisis is a conflationary tactic. It is absolutely possible to get families in need real help without it ‘costing’ them their family ties or custodial rights. Decoupling the two actually increases the odds of people getting the help they need, as few families are willing to permanently relinquish their parental rights to help a child gain access to the system.

Falsely linking the two only enables child abandonment to continue, causing maximum damage, a lifetime’s worth of damage to these kids, all while riding on the good intentions of those seeking help.

As for the 2.0 infants, they will of course be facing a different set of issues, but will be no less abandoned, at the state’s encouragement. Their parents will also be in crisis, and no dump law is going to offer real solutions for them.

The Nebraska fiasco only exposed what lies at the core of any dump law: desperation and lack of options.

It’s past time to dump the dump laws and instead demand legislators roll up their sleeves and do the real work, building real structures towards prevention and crisis intervention.

Outsourcing Nebraska’s child welfare problems to “faith based” private agencies or “aging down” in a vain attempt to sidestep the issues the older child abandonments raise are not solutions, they’re not even band-aids.

Rather than trying to manufacture “new and better” ways of the state encouraging legalized child abandonment, the state should instead, be tackling the underlying problems that lead guardians to dump the kids in the first place.

As I keep saying, kids deserve better than abandonment.

Mere monkeying with age limits is no “solution.”

As an immediate measure, the legislature needs to repeal the dump law to prevent even further harm be done to still more kids and their families.

Then as a second step, they need to stop looking to whatever next ‘quick fix’ advocates and salespeople of various stripes would like to sell them on, and instead do the real work.

The kids are waiting, will Nebraska legislators step up?

***

More of the same, but with a new twist.

Quotes taken from Attempted Safe Haven Case:

…a 34 year old mother showed up at Bryan LGH West 11:15 Monday morning to drop off her 15 year old daughter under the state’s safe haven law. The woman told officials the daughter was a run-away and she couldn’t handle her behavior. The woman also told police she was worried for her young son when the girl was home and had begun filing paperwork to make the girl a ward of the state, but it was taking too long.

Once again, we run head long into one of the real reasons behind these child dumps, going the usual route just takes too long for some. Apparently it’s just too darn hard to get rid of a kid.

Poor thing!

But instead of going ahead with the abandonment, an officer talked the woman down to ‘merely’ having the girl committed to the hospital’s psych unit:

A Lincoln officer talked with the woman and doctors at the hospital and worked out an arrangement where the girl was admitted into the hospital’s child psychiatric service instead of abandoned under safe haven.

I guess all these dump stats are bringing too much attention and heat on Nebraska, they’re down to one on one trying to talk dumpers into alternatives that keep the kids out of the state’s stats.

As I said in yesterday’s post Nebraska- two 12 year-old boys legally abandoned this past weekend, & ‘gaming’ the numbers “Baby Love Child” being a bastard based blog, around here I focus on the experience of the kids themselves, and my numbers are going to reflect the number of kids attempted to be dumped not necessarily NE DHHS’s ‘dump accomplished’ count.

The piece goes on to point out, this is not the first time the Lincoln (Nebraska) Police Department has stepped in to divert dump bound familes:

Casady says this is the second time LPD has helped a family considering using the safe haven law.

So I guess the real question is, statewide, how many other attempted dumps have been redirected and may be going unreported?

Has Nebraska finally begun to reach the point of attempted spin control, trying to keep dump bound guardians from actually completing the child dump?

Clearly Nebraska officials understand the official number count is being watched, (yes you can subscribe to their “Safe haven” webpage). The official Nebraska DHHS count does not include a kid left at unauthorized location (a police station), nor the 18 year-old who tried to “safe haven” himself. Nor will the official tally include cases such as this girl, who but for Lincoln police intervention would have been legally abandoned (kid #19 if all attempted cases are included.) so the question arises, is there now an active effort to keep the numbers down/more cases out of the state stats?

The real answer to legalized abandonment is to for Nebraska legislators to realize that “safe haven” laws are no answer to the real problems kids and families face and repeal the law. They have an opportunity to lead the way, learning from Nebraska’s experimentation with legalized child abandonment, and step back away from this irresponsible form of legislation, back into the realm of actual kid-based social support structures.

Am I holding my breath for full repeal? Unfortunately no.

Why? Because odds are good that rather than doing right by Nebraska’s kids and families and repealing the law, state lawmakers are instead going to go for a round two ‘dump law 2.0′, trying to monkey with the age requirements on legalized child abandonments, which will only end up screwing kids younger and less vocal (for the time being.)

Further, baby dump laws have dire consequences for womyn, encouraging them to hide their pregnancies, ecshew prenatal care, and give birth secretly (endangering their own lives) in hopes of being able to ‘make the problem go away’ via legalized baby dumping.

Nebraska has the opportunity to step up and say ‘no more, we don’t and won’t abandon children (and womyn) that way here’. It has an opportunity to take the leadership position of sending the clear message that in Nebraska at least, THIS state does not encourage child abandonment.

But odds are they’ll opt for what they see as the easy way out, and just go for the aged down version. The damage will continue.

And that’s the real shame, that not a single state is willing to buck the baby-dumping trend to say no, we don’t dump our kids around here.

It is legal to dump newborns in all 50 states.

To our shame.

Bastardette has also blogged about the latest attempted dump, MOTHER ‘ATTEMPTS” TO DUMP TEEN DAUGHTER IN OMAHA. I’ll just close with her wise words:

How much worse does this have to get before the legislature, stops husking corn, and repeals this travesty? No, the law doesn’t need tweaked or tightened-up or any other quaint-worded fix politicians want to throw about. The mass dumping of Nebraska’s children is the perfect consequence of what we have been saying would happen for the last nine years.

How many more kids have to be abandoned before states begin to listen?