Giving Up Baby

Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice

Laury Oaks

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479867523
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

“Baby safe haven” laws, which allow a parent to relinquish anewborn baby legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location—suchas a hospital or fire station—were established in every state between 1999 and2009. Promoted during a time of heated public debate over policies on abortion,sex education, teen pregnancy, adoption, welfare, immigrant reproduction, andchild abuse, safe haven laws were passed by the majority of states with littlecontest. These laws were thought to offer a solution tothe consequences of unwanted pregnancies: mothers would no longer beburdened with children they could not care for, and newborn babies would nolonger be abandoned in dumpsters.

Yet while these laws are well meaning, they ignore the real problem: somewomen lack key social and economic supports that mothers need to raisechildren. Safe haven laws do little to help disadvantaged women. Instead,advocates of safe haven laws target teenagers, women of color, and poor womenwith safe haven information and see relinquishing custody of their newborns asan act of maternal love. Disadvantaged women are preemptively judged as “bad”mothers whose babies would be better off without them.

Laury Oaks argues that the labeling of certain kinds ofwomen as potential “bad” mothers who should consider anonymously giving uptheir newborns for adoption into a “loving” home should best be understood asan issue of reproductive justice. Safe haven discourses promote narrow imagesof who deserves to be a mother and reflect restrictive views on how we shouldtreat women experiencing unwanted pregnancy.

1

The Work of Saving Babies’ Lives and Souls

If child life was sacred, child death became an intolerable sacrilege, provoking not only parental sorrow but social bereavement as well.

—Historian Viviana Zelizer on the rise of funerals for children in United States in the mid-1920s (1994, 23)

You hate to see even one more child being buried . . . But what’s really frightening is there are so many out there we’ll probably never know about.

—Judy Sturlaugson, Garden of Angels volunteer (quoted in Whitaker 2000)

The AMT Children of Hope Foundation is making an urgent plea to the public in an effort to save the lives of unwanted and abandoned infants by promoting “Safe Havens.”

—AMT Children of Hope Foundation press release after a newborn was found in a Brooklyn, New York housing project trash chute in May 2011

We turn now to consider several narratives of social responsibility that are embedded within infant abandonment prevention discourses: all good mothers choose life over death; innocent infants rescued from their mothers can be saved and nurtured by deserving families; and every newborn is sacred and must be honored through community rituals. To attain the goals set out in these narratives, advocacy for safe haven laws has most visibly promoted overlapping legal and educational strategies to prevent the unsafe, public abandonment of newborns by lobbying for the institution of safe haven laws and creating campaigns to alert people about the laws. Even before states considered passing safe haven laws, some activists, drawing on these social responsibility narratives, sought to urge women to safely relinquish unwanted newborns so that they could be placed in loving adoptive families. Many of the early abandonment prevention activists built on their work to save babies’ souls through community burial rituals for newborns who were abandoned and found dead. Understanding the underlying cultural meanings that have been attached to safe haven laws requires exploration of how and why some individuals were motivated to do lobbying and education to prevent infant abandonment, and how this advocacy is linked to antiabortion philosophies and aims.

This underpinning has consequences for how some women and girls are approached by safe haven advocates and portrayed as potential newborn abandoners. Through their outreach to at-risk women and girls—those considered at risk of dumping a newborn—safe haven advocacy organizations both emphasize that the law allows women to anonymously surrender a newborn and advertise that their organizations assist women to make what they interpret as the right decision to use a safe haven. These organizations do so in ways that draw on the antiabortion movement’s crisis pregnancy center model.

Given the ubiquitous visibility of abortion politics in the United States, a notable dimension of safe haven advocacy is the absence of direct talk about abortion—but the unspoken omnipresence of it—in discourses about infant abandonment. The images and rhetoric employed by safe haven organizations parallels that advanced by advocates who represent what sociologist Ziad Munson (2009) calls the “individual outreach stream” of the antiabortion movement. He argues that this stream is underpublicized despite the fact that the majority of “pro-life movement volunteer hours” are spent in this stream, primarily through work in crisis pregnancy centers. Reporting five years after Munson’s research, New York Times journalist Pam Belluck (2013) suggested that support for and visibility of antiabortion pregnancy centers is rising, with 2,500 such centers serving 2 million women annually, according to one antiabortion leader. Many of these centers promote an explicit evangelical Christian pro-adoption campaign that was launched in 2007; adopted babies are symbolically saved twice, first through life (versus abortion or abandonment) and second by growing up in two-parent Christian homes (see Simon 2007; Kelly 2012; Joyce 2013, chapter 3).1 Although safe haven advocacy organizations do not explicitly identify themselves as affiliated with this arm of the antiabortion movement, these baby-saving activists share parallel philosophies and strategies.

Taking Action: One Infant at a Time, Dead or Alive

A shared aspect of efforts to prevent unsafe infant abandonment is that many organizations claim to have been inspired by an emotionally gripping experience of one individual who does not act as part of a larger movement or organization. These everyday citizens are moved to action to prevent infant abandonment and honor the souls of abandoned babies, due to their strong reactions to learning about an abandoned newborn’s death. A 2000 report in TIME magazine about the safe haven legislative movement sweeping the United States included this depiction of a Pennsylvania woman bringing her local community together to “do something” to prevent another abandoned newborn:

The impetus for change comes from small groups of homespun activists. In suburban Pittsburgh, Pa., Gigi Kelly, a nurse and mother, was inspired to begin a local campaign after a healthy 8-lb. baby boy was left in a trash bag behind her family’s church. Kelly found an old laundry basket, lined it with a warm blanket and put it on her front porch. Then she called reporters with a plea for young mothers to bring their babies to her. I’ll take it from there, she promised. Nobody has taken up her offer yet, but still she waits. “It’s a strange feeling when you lay your head on the pillow at night,” she says. “Kind of spooky.” With only a manual typewriter and a fax machine, she turned her Baskets for Babies program into a public awareness campaign for young moms who think they have nowhere to turn. Now when night falls on Pittsburgh, 608 families leave their porch lights on and have their baskets ready. (Roche 2000)2

None of the baskets were ever used, but the project served as a platform for a future safe haven policy (McNulty 1999). The organization’s suggestion of fire stations as drop-off sites follows the model provided by the first safe haven law, passed in Texas in 1999, the same year Baskets for Babies was organized. The Pittsburgh effort transformed from baskets to hospitals, and by 2003, when Pennsylvania passed a safe haven law, 19 Pittsburgh-area hospitals already were “part of a network that provided safe havens for newborns under a voluntary program called A Hand To Hold” (Fuoco 2003; see also Carpenter 2000).

Kelly’s local activism directly addressed preventing unsafe baby abandonment, but other activists shifted their attention to safe havens from different advocacy activities: most often this has been burial services for abandoned infants. Exploring this realm of advocacy helps make sense of the connection between infant burials and infant safe havens. Organizations across the United States and in other countries are dedicated to providing burials for abandoned and unclaimed infants. The aim of these groups is to provide names and dignified memorials, and to bury the bodies in marked graves located in special sections of cemeteries. If advocates did not provide burials the remains would be deposited in unmarked graves—a circumstance perceived as intolerable by these advocates because it inadequately recognizes the individual being and, importantly, the dead baby’s soul.

Although in Christian thought a proper burial is not needed for a soul to ascend to heaven, these rituals bring together a community of people to emphasize an underlying pro-life advocacy message, as explained on the Priests for Life website in the “Why is Life Sacred” section: “Christians proclaim a Gospel of Life. This ‘life’ is sacred because it takes its origin in God, belongs to God, and returns to God . . . But in the end, and to find one’s way through the challenges of this brief life, one must come to terms with the fact that to touch human life is to touch God, and therefore the only way to touch human life is with love.” Infant burial advocates’ expressions of caring and love for abandoned babies enact these very connections. The community in which the pregnant woman gave birth failed to save her newborn’s life. The community assembled by these activists responds to this failure by demonstrating that our society does care about every baby’s life and every baby’s death.

A network of baby burial activists has encouraged local groups to claim areas of cemeteries, handcraft baby-sized coffins, and memorialize the unclaimed remains of babies by celebrating the sacredness of life. The nonprofit organization Garden of Innocence National, based in California, advertises on its website burial services for “abandoned and unidentified children,” with locations in eight cities in the United States and in Montreal, Canada (n.d.a). Memorial services feature little caskets lined with brightly colored fabric and toys, funeral flowers, music, poetry, officiates, and formally dressed attendants. In San Diego, the conservative Catholic group Knights of Columbus assembles up to 70 attendants at infant memorials, dramatically dressed in black and red with “capes, caps, gloves and swords,” as reported on the “Who are the Guys in Uniform?” page of the Garden of Innocence San Diego website (Garden of Innocence San Diego n.d.).

The founding story of Garden of Innocence, similar to Gigi Kelly’s Baskets for Babies story in Pittsburgh, centers on a powerful emotional reaction to an abandoned baby felt by Elissa Davey, a white woman living in San Diego County and working as a realtor. As the website explains:

Garden of Innocence was founded by a wonderful group of people in San Diego, California in 1998. Elissa Davey’s compassionate vision began to unfold. After reading an article about a baby boy who was found in a trash can on a local college campus in Chula Vista, California. Elissa decided to take action and do something about it. Many times, too often, we run across stories like these, only to think about it for a short time and eventually forget and move on with our daily lives . . . Approximately one year later, a “Dignified Place” [in a cemetery] was established. Since that time every baby declared abandoned or unidentified in the San Diego County has been released to Garden of Innocence. Garden of Innocence/San Diego is our first garden, leading the way to start other gardens so no other infant is sent home without someone who cared. (Garden of Innocence n.d.b)

The home is heaven, and the organization’s effort is to establish a community of care for newborns who died due to maltreatment. The spiritual dimension of the organization’s ambitious work is bolstered by the efforts of Davey, who is a “Practitioner with Church of Religious Science and is an ordained non denominational minister” and “Dr. Pastor Netreia Carroll, (known as Mother Theresa of San Diego) [who] has partnered with Elissa Davey to set the grounds for Gardens in every state and around the world.” The website’s “What Do We Do?” page announces, “we are non-denominational. Every faith, every nationality is welcome in this garden. We are colored [sic] blind. We reach out to our little babies and love them when no one else did” (Garden of Innocence n.d.a).

The possessive use of “our little babies” demonstrates the guardian relationship that such activists create, which is also emphasized in other the work of others. Rest In His Arms is a nonprofit based in the Chicago area that “spiritually adopts” abandoned babies in order to provide names, memorial services, and marked burial sites. Using language similar to Garden of Innocence’s nondenominational appeal, but emphasizing specifically its Christian approach, the website states that “Each child is lovingly laid to rest and sent home to the open and comforting arms of our Creator” (Rest In His Arms 2009). The group’s webpage includes a drawing of Jesus comforting an upset infant, and a cross serves as the “T” in “Rest” in His Arms, symbolizing the organization’s religious perspective. Rest In His Arms provides information about the Illinois safe haven law, and the website has a link to a listing of all state safe haven laws.

At the start of this research I knew nothing about infant burial organizations, which points to my lack of moving in the same social and political circles with individuals and groups charged with saving souls. I was quite surprised to follow a trail from safe haven advocacy to burial activists, although others would not be. For example, former Louisiana Republican Representative Tony Perkins, who went on to become the president of the conservative Family Research Council, noted that nine years after the state implemented a safe haven law, a woman approached him “who had been making clothes for the babies that had been abandoned and providing funeral services for them, asking why more was not done to promote the Safe Haven Law” (quoted in Iancu 2010, 246). The advocacy trail leads still further, from the mission of saving souls via proper burial memorials to the mission of preventing the loss of souls to attempts to save “unborn babies” by antiabortion advocates. The overarching connection between these activist efforts is the promotion of visible actions to save innocent babies’ souls and lives from their mothers’ decisions.

Nonprofit infant burial organizations are symbolically linked to antiabortion perspectives and run parallel to some antiabortion advocates’ activities. Feminist medical anthropologist Lynn Morgan (2009) writes that the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago has a “body find” strategy, in which they remove fetal remains from pathology labs and distribute them to organizations across the United States for public burials. A particularly elaborate burial staging took place in 1998, when a Christian pro-life group held a funeral for 54 fetuses following the strategic release of the fetal remains by a San Bernardino County, California coroner to the group (Morgan 2009, 241). The remains were held as medical evidence in a year-long case against a truck driver who illegally placed the remains in a field; the evidence otherwise would have been incinerated. The group named each fetus and filmed the parade of 54 little white caskets at the burial (Morgan 2009, 241). Ziad Munson discovered abortion memorials across the country, including an annual ritual in Charleston, South Carolina, to “honor babies killed by abortion”; tombstone markers established by Catholic Knights of Columbus in Watertown, Massachusetts; and the “chapel of innocents” in the Twin Cities, Minnesota (2009, 173). Morgan (2009, 240–41), Sanger (2006), Munson (2009, 116), and other scholars point to the pervasiveness in antiabortion organizations of the “culture of life” discourse, emphasized by Pope John Paul II in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”) to mark the sacredness of human life “from conception to natural death.” This discourse is evident in infant burial and abandonment prevention advocacy.

Abandoned infant burial organizations help clarify that all efforts to save babies are connected to a network of projects to save lives, bodies, and souls both before and after birth. What is often left out of this pinpointed focus on “babies” is the symbolic and real position of the mothers who are framed as uncaring criminals or as irresponsible citizens, or who are simply not acknowledged at all. Similarly, discourses surrounding safe haven laws draw on beliefs about the sacredness of each innocent baby’s life and the importance of taking action to save each and every life and soul. By exploring several high-profile groups that work in newborn abandonment prevention—each established before safe haven laws were passed—we can discern advocates’ aim to save newborns by urging some women and girls to become legal, responsible, and invisible safe haven moms.

The Imagined Hope Family and Community Efforts to Save Babies

The prominent safe haven awareness organization AMT (Ambulance Medical Technician) Children of Hope Foundation is based on Long Island, New York, and has a very active leader. A paramedic for the Nassau County Police Department and a father and grandfather, Timothy Jaccard started up and ran the organization out of his home in 1998. AMT Children of Hope, as its “Who We Are” website page explains, predates safe haven legislation and was established as an infant burial organization. Jaccard was featured in a local news article with a title that emphasizes his current mission, “Inside Tim Jaccard’s Children of Hope and Baby Safe Haven Crusade” (Domash, Gallucci, and Twarowski 2010). In 1997 Jaccard responded as an ambulance medical technician to a scene where a newborn girl had drowned in a courthouse toilet, and spontaneously wept. Within weeks, three more abandoned newborns were reported to him, initiating his activism. It is unclear whether in Jaccard’s 37 years of AMT service these were the only abandoned newborn cases to which he responded.

These deaths motivated Jaccard to found the nonprofit foundation, which began as a fundraising group for abandoned newborns’ burial services. Jaccard gains legal custody of local abandoned babies who die in order to “adopt” them, arranges burials, and visits the Children of Hope section of the Holy Rood, New Jersey, Catholic cemetery monthly to say a prayer for “his” babies (“For Unwanted Babies, a Safety Net” 2000). Each buried baby is given a name, and all share the last name Hope (Archibold 1999). The Hope family is represented as diverse and embracing all lives: the foundation’s information section of their website pledges to “help save the lives of infants who have been abandoned . . . without regard to race, color, age, creed or national origin.”

In addition to the Christian (and, more specifically, Catholic) burial rites that Children of Hope sponsors to save babies’ souls, other religious symbolism is reflected in narratives of the organization’s work. According to a 2010 “Safe Haven Story” posted on the website, Jaccard is a Catholic church community member, attends coming-of-age religious initiations for children, and feels deep pain about infant death:

The fact so many newborn infants have been adopted to loving families and I have been invited to their conformations [sic], baptisms, and then to have to baptize the baby that has been victim to neonaticide knowing that the child could have been adopted by a loving family is heart wrenching.3 I get a knot in my stomach thinking that this child could have survived had the mother called and relinquished the baby anonymously to us. (AMT Children of Hope Foundation 2010)

This story includes a Good Friday and Easter inspirational narrative. On Good Friday in 2010, “Tim was having one of his rare breakfasts with his wife when the crisis ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Safe Haven Laws Are Not Only about Saving Babies
• 1. The Work of Saving Babies’ Lives and Souls
• 2. Girls at Risk of Dumping Their Newborns
• 3. Relinquishing Motherhood: How and Why Safe Haven Surrenders Happen
• 4. The Unsurpassed Adoption Value of Safe Haven Babies
• Conclusion: Safe Haven Laws and Advancing Reproductive Justice
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author