Turmoil over US abortions turns spotlight on safe havens for newborns

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The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

Nearly 13 years ago, I found an abandoned baby in the street in China, where I was then living as the FT’s Shanghai correspondent. My own two adopted children were left in public places within days of their birth. So my ears pricked up when US Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett, herself an adoptive mother, asked why Americans could not simply use “safe haven” laws to drop off their newborns at a fire station or hospital as an alternative to abortion.

She made this comment during oral arguments in Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the landmark case that overturned the US constitutional right to abortion. The US abortion landscape remains in turmoil just over a year after that ruling, which unleashed a flood of new state laws severely restricting or removing abortion access for millions of Americans. 

So what of Barrett’s blithe suggestion that Americans use safe haven laws — which exist in all 50 states — to surrender their child, legally and anonymously, at designated locations, including putting them in a climate-controlled “safe haven baby box” for immediate retrieval by medical staff? 

Infant abandonment has a long global history: today’s US baby boxes are descended from medieval Italian “ruota” or abandonment wheels set into the windows of Italian founding homes. In America, though, they are both new and very controversial. Safe haven laws were first passed in Texas in 1999, known as the “Baby Moses” law, after a number of highly publicised infant abandonments in rubbish bins or public bathrooms. But they have been a casualty of US politics: the left sees them as a political project of the religious right — and comments such as Barrett’s don’t help. 

Are more women using them, post-Dobbs? Safe Haven Baby Boxes, an activist group, says baby box numbers have nearly doubled since the Supreme Court ruling, to 156 in 10 states, and the National Safe Haven Alliance says it has seen a 10 per cent rise in crisis call volume in that period. Still, the numbers are small: the alliance told me there had been 40 safe haven surrenders this year and 19 illegal abandonments, in which 15 of the babies died.

Marley Greiner, of Stop Safe Haven Baby Boxes Now says there have been 11 babies left in boxes so far this year, more than any previous full year but still a rare occurrence. Safe haven experts say it’s too soon to tell whether this number will grow as new abortion restrictions kick in. 

US abortions have fallen since the Dobbs ruling, but no one can be sure of exact figures. #WeCount, which aims to provide post-Dobbs abortion statistics, estimates there were 25,000 fewer abortions in the formal US health system in the first nine months after the ruling. According to Dr Alison Norris, #WeCount co-chair and associate professor at The Ohio State University’s College of Public Health, “Many . . . will have self-managed their abortion, buying pills online”. She says while it is important to have the options of adoption and safe havens, “they are simply not replacements for access to abortion care”.

Pam Stenzel, director of Safe Haven Baby Boxes’ crisis hotline, argues that they are necessary because US babies are still dying in illegal abandonments. She points to the death of newborn twins last month after they were discovered in a rubbish bag at a Chicago day care centre.

Stenzel says women who use baby boxes are afraid that handing their newborn over to a firefighter or emergency room nurse would jeopardise their anonymity. But Dawn Geras, founder of the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, says mothers who hand over babies in person can get medical care, and more than 25 per cent of them either raise the baby themselves or make an adoption plan.

I, for one, am sorry that baby boxes have been caught up in the mess of US abortion politics. Women who want to surrender babies anonymously are rare — but I’m glad they have safe haven options. That would certainly have been preferable for the baby I found in Shanghai: at that time, her parent had no alternative but to leave her outside a doughnut shop on a winter evening — and hope someone came along quickly to find her.