Safe Haven Legislation (Baby Moses Law)

[JayS]

Do you have any opposition to this type of legislation? If so, why?



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http://www.babymoses.org/faq.htm#9

SAVING ABANDONED NEWBORNS:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BABY MOSES PROJECT
The Baby Moses Project is a non-profit organization whose purpose is two fold: first, to save the lives of newborn infants, and second, to provide protection from prosecution for those mothers who choose a responsible alternative to abandonment. To accomplish this, the public must be informed of the passage of Safe Haven Legislation. This bill permits a mother to voluntarily relinquish the custody of her infant to an emergency medical service provider, who in turn, will give the child to the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services for adoptive placement. In addition to being given anonymity, the mother will also be provided with an affirmative defense to abandonment prosecution.

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http://library.adoption.com/Laws-Legal-Issues/The-Wall-Street-Journals...

After 38 years with The Wall Street Journal and despite serving as Executive Washington editor for that paper, not to mention his prominence as a regular on CNN's "The Capital Gang," it is to be expected that Al Hunt will strike out once in a while strictly on the basis of not reporting the facts. (There's no point in trying to assess Hunt's score on ideology, given the fact that he's the resident "liberal" of a paper with a consistently "conservative" philosophy.)

Sadly, Hunt goofed in an area - children's issues and adoption - where he's got a deep and abiding personal interest, he's an adoptive parent and is supportive of adoption. Hunt has often hit homers. Most notably, Hunt was on former President Clinton's back about having a Department of Health and Human Services that tolerated race-based placement policies for children receiving federal funds. And Hunt was supportive of foster care reforms undertaken by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Hunt's folly came in an Aug. 21, 2003, "Politics & People" column in The Wall Street Journal entitled "No Safe Haven." "Safe Haven" refers to those laws, sometimes also called "Baby Moses" laws which allow women, or someone they give their babies to, to have an option other than unsafely abandoning their newborns - or killing them. The essence of the laws is that women can anonymously put their children in the arms of someone at a Safe Haven, or leave their babies at a Safe Haven site - usually a hospital or fire station - without fear of being prosecuted for child abandonment. The first such bill, in Texas, was signed into law on June 3, 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush. Since then, 44 other states have passed various versions of the Texas law.

Maybe Hunt's problem has something to do with the fact that President Bush and Texas Republican Geanie Morrison, a GOP State Representative from Victoria, were godparents of the movement to pass these laws. Whatever the reasons, Hunt decided to write a column Aug. 21 about a "pocket veto" of a law nearly unanimously passed by the Hawaii legislature months ago. What prompted Hunt to drag this dead bill out and prop it up is unknown. There's certainly little debate at present in any of the remaining state legislatures about such bills.

*SNIP*

Hay's counterpart at the state level in Austin, Geoff Wool, Director of Public Information for TDPRS, says his Department does not attempt to collect data on or report on Baby Moses relinquishments. What is available are data for all babies that fall within the age range of the Baby Moses law, including babies presumably like those saved in Houston in 2002, and who are found alive. And those numbers do not show the law to be a "failure" unless declining abandonments is equated with "failure." Abandonments, even after Rep. Morrison expanded the law in 2001 to babies 31-60 days of age, went down every year. In 2000, the first full year after the law passed, there were 54 live babies abandoned in Texas. In 2001, with an expanded pool of babies, it was 43 babies. In 2002, it was 38 babies. A near one-third drop in abandonments from 2000 to 2002 hardly seems like a failure.

*SNIP*

[CO Liberal]

1. They Have a Law Like That Here in Colorado

Yet babies are still being abandoned in places where their lives are in peril.....

[TX-RAT]

4. About 15 yrs ago

I was called out to a abandoned farm where suspicious activity was reported. I figured it was just going to be juveniles farting around. I found a suitcase with a 7 month old fetus, that had been there for about 2 days. Thats a tear jerker. We never found the suspect.

[JayS]

6. That is something that would haunt me forever. I wonder how...

...the officers here that found the baby that was being eaten (literally) alive by fireants deal with that memory.

[TexasMexican]

7. not to shit on this thread...

but there are people here who would question calling a 7 month old fetus a baby.

I'm not one of them, its all semantics to me.

Yeah thats pretty fucking horrible.

[TX-RAT]

13. Probably a bad choice of words.

[iverglas]

14. not bad; possibly inaccurate

Before birth, a fetus is a fetus, no matter what the gestational age. After successful (live) birth of a viable fetus, it is a baby. Prior to viability, delivery of a dead fetus is commonly called a miscarriage (a spontaneous abortion). If the fetus was sufficiently developed that it could have survived birth but didn't, the delivery is usually called a stillbirth, and the fetus might be called a baby.

With a seven-month fetus, you wouldn't have known at the time whether it had been delivered alive or not. Chances of survival for a fetus delivered alive at 7 months (28 weeks) are decent, with proper care, but there's no guarantee it was born alive or would have survived (as in fact there isn't even at full term).

A woman in an isolated situation who went into labour unexpectedly at that stage might have been unable to get the help she needed for herself and the baby, if it was born alive -- in fact her life as well as the fetus's could be at risk, since there are common complications in delivery that can cause death if there is no medical assistance. In the case you describe, it seems unlikely that the delivery occurred at the farmhouse, but it's entirely possible that the fetus did not survive delivery and the woman, quite likely young and not coping appropriately with the pregnancy, was simply unable to cope with the event, whether there was a live delivery or not.

[TX-RAT]

15. Thanks

I'm afraid we'll never know the story. We suspect it was a local woman, due to the seclusion of the house. It's also where all the kids go for keg party's.

[JayS]

16. Here is the baby that was saved.

June 10, 2004, 6:22AM
Search for baby's mother runs into legal quandary
By MELANIE MARKLEY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/topstory/2619411

Children's Protective Services officials say they want to find the mother of an abandoned newborn to make sure the parents want to give up custody so a waiting family can adopt the girl.

But the author of a law designed to shield parents from prosecution if they leave their unwanted baby at a hospital or fire station is worried. She fears CPS will have a chilling effect on people using the law if the agency tries to track down the identity of a mother who doesn't want to be found.

"My concern is that these mothers are in a desperate situation for whatever reason, and they've hidden their pregnancy and had the baby on their own," said state Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria. "I think probably the last thing they want is for someone to try to track them down to find out who they are because they wouldn't be using this law if they were going to use the normal form of relinquishment or adoption."

Wednesday, CPS officials invited the media to publicize the photograph of a recently abandoned baby in hopes the family will come forward and provide information. The girl was left over the weekend at Memorial Hermann Southeast Hospital.

*SNIP*

[MrBenchley]

5. Some interesting reading....

"The merits of this 'safe surrender' legislation have been debated openly in the mainstream press, but what hasn't been acknowledged so forthrightly are the connections to the anti-choice movement. While it's true that safe surrender legislation has been supported by disparate forces--Democrats and Republicans, pro-choice and anti-choice crusaders-many of the people involved in the safe surrender efforts across the country are also involved in antiabortion activities.
...
Indeed, some of the founding fathers and mothers of baby abandonment legislation come from the same groups that support abstinence education, parental consent, and other campaigns to limit reproductive health services. Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), says that it's hardly a coincidence that anti-choice advocates are involved in both issues. 'They've created a climate of shame around sexuality,' she says, 'and I can only hypothesize, but perhaps there's some guilt involved. After all, it's the teachings of anti-choice thinkers that have driven young people into a corner where they might feel compelled to keep their parents, or neighbors, or minister from finding out about a pregnancy. These are the women who will wait past the time that an abortion is safe and who are at risk of trying to hide the birth of their baby.'"

http://www.loper.org/~george/repchoice/2000/Oct/79.html

Worth noting that a yahoo search for "baby moses" and "planned parenthood" includes all these links...

www.nevadalife.org/new_page_6.htm -

www.covenantnews.com/abortion/archives/2003_07.html -

afterabortion.blogspot.com/2003_06_15_afterabortion_archive.html - -

www.illinoisrighttolife.org/NewslineArchive0603.htm -

www.covenantnews.com/abortion/archives/000550.html -

www.mttu.com/Articles/Godarchy%20Line061903.htm - -

www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?art_id=19397

www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/948159/posts -

www.goodnewsetc.com/073PRO1.htm -

www.americansunitedforlife.org/report_cards/PDFs/Tennessee.pdf -

www.worldmag.com/world/issue/06-24-00/cover_1.asp - 24k - -

[displacedtexan]

2. Illinois law lets parent(s) leave a newborn at hospitals (3 days old)...

And yet you still read stories like this:

Wednesday, June 9, 2004

Woman claims baby was stillborn

Lisa Scott guilty of involuntary manslaughter

By Steve Silverman
[e-mail]
BLOOMINGTON -- A Normal woman who deposited her newborn in a trash bin before going to work and then traveling to Florida for spring vacation admitted Tuesday to unintentionally killing the baby girl.

Lisa D. Scott, 22, pleaded guilty in McLean County Circuit Court to involuntary manslaughter in connection with the infant's death March 7, 2003. The charge states Scott "erroneously" believed the baby was dead when she separated her from the placenta and put her in a plastic bag.

In exchange for the plea, prosecutors dismissed charges of first-degree murder and concealment of a homicide. Scott faces a penalty ranging from three to 14 years in prison when she's sentenced Aug. 2.

http://www.pantagraph.com/stories/060904/new_20040609013.shtml

[RoeBear]

3. FYI- a 'Normal' woman means...

...a woman from Normal, Illinois.

[mosin]

8. Safe Haven laws

I support safe haven laws. I honestly have never heard a serious argument in opposition. I believe that the likelihood of saving even a few babies outweighs any interest society would have in prosecuting the mothers for abandonment.

[JayS]

9. I made a post in GD that barely mentioned the Safe Haven...

...stuff and it got more "reply deleted" messages than I have ever had in one of my posts.




http://www.babymoses.org/faq.htm#21

Is anyone opposed to this legislation?

Yes, there are individuals and some groups who have expressed opposition in various public forums. Following are some of the objections and responses.

On the internet, there is a discussion of these new programs on "About.com," a network of sites led by expert guides, called "New Option: Legal Abandonment." An article was posted on the "Adoption" GuideSite, which is hosted by Nancy "Sass" Stanfield, beginning Jan. 17, 2000. Ms. Stanfield identifies herself as a person who was adopted and who searched out her birth parents. Ms. Stanfield's article reflects the subjective viewpoints of those who believe in one-way searches for birth parents, especially in her description of the Morrison law. Ms. Stanfield raises five objections in a list of accusations which begin "Nowhere does the law…." The first objection is that the person doesn't identify her or their self - but that's the whole purpose of the law, to allow for anonymous but safe placing of a child with licensed medical specialists. The second objection is that there is no relinquishment signed - but this is anonymous legal abandonment, not adoption, where voluntary relinquishments are signed. The third objection is that the person does not provide medical information - but that would hardly be expected when someone is anonymously depositing a baby. With respect for the newborn's life, it is better to have a baby that is safely delivered to an EMT without medical records than a baby found in a Dumpster with medical records by the corpse. The fourth objection is simply incorrect: Safe Haven Legislation does not need to state a period when a person abandoning a child may change their mind, as that period is already specified at length in Texas law. The fifth objection is also incorrect: Safe Haven Legislation does not need to require the state to try and obtain any information because such requirements are already built into the state's protective services laws and regulations.34

There is also an article on "Foundling Asylums" in an Online Edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia, Copyright 1999, which is dated from 1909, that may be cited by some who oppose Safe Haven Legislation and similar approaches to abandonment. The article is about 100 years out of date, but does contain some very interesting historical information. In context, the article clearly stresses the fact that foundling homes and various approaches were meant to protect the lives of vulnerable infants. The article condemns the existence of institutions and devices that allow babies to be safely and anonymously deposited. One such idea, recently revived to prevent the death of abandoned babies in South Africa, was a revolving crib that allowed the baby to be brought inside while preserving the privacy of the person or persons who put the child in the crib. As the program in Johannesburg demonstrates, such approaches work because an average of one baby a month has safely been deposited in a large mail slot cut in the door of a Baptist church. This large South African city is the scene of about a dozen infants being found each year dead, in the garbage or exposed outside.35 The article also argues that 18 months of "support" is given to mothers of babies. The experience of the U.S. with Aid to Families with Dependent Children has demonstrated that welfare is no solution and the numbers of neglected and abused children continues to rise, even in the aftermath of new initiatives to protect children. The three main objections to foundling homes 100 years ago were: "…the very high death rate in these places (sometimes more than 90 percent), …the smaller expense of the family system, and…the obvious fact that the family is the natural home for young children." Today, babies are not maintained in large institutions. Family foster care is less expensive and widely used, even when the child has been abandoned. Indeed, in Minnesota and elsewhere some of the leading advocates of a more practical approach to the problem of abandonment - including guarantees of privacy and anonymity, as well as placement of children for adoption - are leaders of the Catholic Church.36 Of course, the most important fact to keep in mind when dealing with abandonment, adoption and other issues is that for the last 50 years, starting first in Korea and more recently in Latin America, India, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and China, babies who are safely abandoned are being adopted by qualified, willing families.


Is there any truth to the claim being made on the internet that these new laws will provide an opening for people to steal babies from women and then dispose of them through adoption?
There has been a large number of postings, under a number of headings but especially under "Re: Calif. Bill would make it "ok" to abandon babies". But even in that forum, the wild charges37 have largely been dismissed.

To the charge that babies will be kidnapped and turned over for adoption, clearly there are procedures to protect against such abuses. The first place a person would turn if their baby disappeared would be to law enforcement officers, public agencies and the like. People who have missing babies will use the many means at their disposal.

One line of argument, advanced in a Jan. 18 posting on the same subject on alt.adoption, criticized France for still allowing anonymous abandonments in the French civil code: "It is also heavily defended by the Catholic Church, among others. Also, the Muslim community in France has advocated for these laws to remain. Several French groups… have been formed to fight for an end to anonymous abandonment… Remember that records are open in France… the only question is whther or not there is any information in them."

The same individual, posting on Jan. 22, raised four separate objections. The first was that these laws are contrary to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The fact is that the U.S. has not ratified that Convention and countries that have, such as France, China, Russia and others allow anonymous relinquishment.

The second is "there is no evidence that any birthmother who would toss a child into a dumpster would be in a position of bother to avail herself of the methodology for anonymous relinquishment provided for in these laws. The experience of one Baptist church in South Africa answers that objection: in five months, five babies have been saved.

The third is the claim that "…the beneficiaries of such a law are more likely to be unscrupulous adoption practitioners who would be able to protect unaccountable relinquishment practices under the guise of anonymous relinquishment." For this charge to have any validity, all the public departments with responsibility for protective services, foster care and adoption would need to be "unscrupulous" and, as publicly-accountable entities, they operate in a full disclosure mode.

The fourth is an ad hominem attack: "…the fact that members of the militant fringe of the far right, such as Operation Rescue and its front organisations, have come out in support of such laws should all that one needs to say on the subject. Generally speaking, in my experience, when people widely believed to be apologists for terrorism support a law, beware the law…" There is wide, bipartisan support for these laws across all ideological lines, as is evident by the fact that the two leading political figures currently working on these matters in Texas are U.S. Rep. Lee, a Democrat, and State Rep. Morrison, a Republican.

Another set of objections is related to establishing the identity of the child in case a parent wanted the have the baby returned. But DNA testing, which is already used to determine paternity in some countries where questions have been raised about kidnapping and valid executions of relinquishment, is a solution far more practical and protective of anonymity and privacy than requiring a woman to accept a hospital or EMT identification band.

Another objection, posted to alt.adoption on Jan. 26 is that "These laws seem designed to expedite the anonymous surrender of parental rights as much as save babies' lives." There is no evidence for such a charge: some of the new law's strongest supporters point to abandonment and loss of babies' lives as the primary concern which motivated them. The more the laws receive acceptance, the wilder grow the accusations, as in this material from a Jan. 26 posting: "I'm concerned about systemic accountability from corrupt child welfare systems. I wouldn't be surprised if given the option of Les Accouchements Sous X in America, unscrupulous county workers start classifying babies they've simply lost the records for or can't be bothered with or for which they received a bribe "legally abandoned" or even for which Medical or Medicare improprieties may have occurred with (a big problem) when in fact no such abandonment occurred. Given past recent experience, I'm sure their partners in crime in the Police Dept will happily help them produce the requisite paperwork…." Such accusations are ludicrous on their face. There is no evidence that such incompetence, corruption and improprieties exist within the county public social service and police systems.

[mosin]

11. Interesting information

Thank you for posting that. After reading through it all and doing a bit of research of my own, I'm still not convinced by any of the arguments against Safe Haven laws.

[JayS]

12. I'm not convinced of their arguments either. Maybe the...

...support for the law expressed by Operation Rescue turned people off on it...or maybe it was because it was started by a Republican. :)

This guy sure went off on a tangent.

http://library.adoption.com/Laws-Legal-Issues/The-Wall-Street-Journals

Maybe Hunt's problem has something to do with the fact that President Bush and Texas Republican Geanie Morrison, a GOP State Representative from Victoria, were godparents of the movement to pass these laws. Whatever the reasons, Hunt decided to write a column Aug. 21 about a "pocket veto" of a law nearly unanimously passed by the Hawaii legislature months ago. What prompted Hunt to drag this dead bill out and prop it up is unknown. There's certainly little debate at present in any of the remaining state legislatures about such bills.

[iverglas]

17. "With respect for the newborn's life ..."

This raises, in my mind, the main objection to these laws. The focus is entirely skewed.

What are needed, in the interests of both the pregnant woman and the potential child, are policies and programs that take both their interests into account.

The best thing for both parties is for the pregnant woman to receive appropriate healthcare throughout the pregnancy. A program that pays attention only to the baby, and only after birth, is less than inadequate.

Cases of babies being killed or abandoned at birth are really quite rate, as a proportion of all births. Far more common are women who don't have proper medical care, nutrition, housing, etc., during pregnancy. In the US, at least. As in other societies where large numbers of people do not have those basic needs met.

For instance, I am unaware of any significant program of this sort in Canada. Instead, we have widespread community-based intervention programs for pregnant women at risk that provide nutritional support and parenting preparation, home check-ups and monitoring after birth, parenting supports at community health and social service centres, universal free health care (i.e. before, during and after pregnancy, for the woman and not just for the fetus or child), and so on.

In Canada, to start with, we don't engage in the moronic and counter-productive practice of teaching children "abstinence" in the schools, and we don't interfere with young people's access to contraception. Abortion is almost universally available, free of charge and without harassment or interference, for any woman who does not want a baby. This is not the case in the US; there are legal, economic and geographic factors that restrict women's access to both to the means to prevent pregnancies and to abortion, and social attitudes that result in women feeling pressured not to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Those attitudes make it difficult for many women to make decisions in their own best interests at the time when the decisions need to be made, whether the decision be to terminate or continue the pregnancy, or to keep or relinquish the child.

Obviously, there are going to be a great many more unwanted children born to unhappy women in the US than in Canada or the other comparable societies where women have a wider range of options. And there are going to be a great many more women who do not have the resources to rear a child in the US than in a society where social and economic supports are more widely available, as they are in Canada and European nations, for instance.

Allowing those women to dump their babies anonymously does not address the problem of unwanted pregnancy and unwanted children. What it does, and one of the things that it is clearly meant to do, is undercut the demand for what women really need: access to options and supports, both for pregnancy (including preventing pregnancy) and for parenting. It is a "solution" to problems that does not solve them at all, it just pretends that it is possible to eliminate one of the unfortunate results of the problems.

In point of fact, it is just as unlikely that a woman, particularly a young, socially isolated and/or economically disadvantaged woman, is going to have the personal resources to avail herself of this option as it is that she will have the personal resources to organize an appropriate response to her pregnancy at any earlier point in it, e.g. by terminating the pregnancy or getting pre-natal care or making adoption arrangements.

What such laws and programs do offer is another opportunity to blame the victim: if a woman does deliver and abandon a child, she just had no excuse, because she could have got a taxi down to the baby chute and done the right thing. The laws and programs completely fail to address the fact that a woman who has denied her pregnancy to that point and extent, has had no access to supports or been incompetent to organize such access, or even is just plain so immature or self-absorbed that she didn't care enough to do so, isn't likely to cut the cord and call a cab.

Problems not solved, but scapegoat found.

If these laws and programs were accompanied by the appropriate outreach to the women targetted, to assist them in organizing the desired response ... well, maybe there wouldn't be such a need for it. Because it would be damned hard to justify the kind of outreach that would persuade women to dump their babies if it did not also include the provision of prenatal care and information about all the options available to those women, if only in the interests of the children they were going to have.

Anybody who is genuinely concerned about those children really has to explain why the only thing they're doing is offering chutes to dump them in, in my ever so humble opinion.

Of course, anybody who claims to be concerned about the women in question would have to do a bit more than that.

"With respect for the newborn's life, it is better to have a baby that is safely delivered to an EMT without medical records than a baby found in a Dumpster with medical records by the corpse."

Gee, talk about yr false dichotomy, not to mention yr utopian assumptions.

What would be even better would be if women who did not want to be pregnant had access to means of preventing pregnancies or terminating them, and if women who did want to be pregnant had access to medical care for their pregnancies and deliveries, and if women who did not want to keep their children had access to services to organize appropriate placement of their children, and if women who did want to keep their children had access to supports to enable them to do that, within the limits of the society's resources. And if all women had access to assistance in determining which of those options are in their own best interests and the interests of the children they might have, and the resources to carry out their decisions without interference or harassment.

Hell, if we're going to assume utopia -- that all women who deliver unwanted babies will carefully drop them in the chute -- why not aim a little higher?

[JayS]

18. The sponsors of this legislation were pretty clear that it was to...

...only be a last ditch effort to save lives. Trying to help women that are in a bad situation with pregnancy was for other legislation to deal with. Most of the abandonment cases were occurring in Houston, which has some fairly good social programs, but dead babies were still regularly found. One lady in Houston knew a lawyer in Austin who had access to the Capitol who found a sympathetic ear for the legislation and got the Governor to support it. The number of dead babies found has dropped so one aspect of a larger problem is lessened.

Cases of babies being killed or abandoned at birth are really quite rate, as a proportion of all births.

I hope it is relatively rare...but we will never know just how rare. There were a number of babies found in dumpsters and the like but we don't know how many were not found.

"With respect for the newborn's life, it is better to have a baby that is safely delivered to an EMT without medical records than a baby found in a Dumpster with medical records by the corpse."

He was intentionally exaggerating in his response to the "no medical records" argument. It was not meant to be an either/or statement.

[iverglas]

19. tsk, tsk

The number of dead babies found has dropped so one aspect of a larger problem is lessened.

And would this be correlation, or causation?

I'd want some more info before I saw even correlation, I'm afraid.

There is simply no reason to believe that any babies who have been dumped in chutes would otherwise have been abandoned or killed. This program may do nothing more than make it easier for people who would have relinquished their children safely in any event to do so with less muss and fuss.

And no, I wouldn't even see "one aspect of a larger problem" being lessened. I'd see a whole lot of still unsolved problems, and perhaps even some new ones, and one symptom possibly alleviated.

I'm afraid that you haven't done any better a job of establishing that this is likely to have any effect on the situations it is meant to address than that source of yours did (let alone that it is the best way of accomplishing the desired effect). One Baptist church in South Africa does not a case make.

[JayS]

20. Well...

And would this be correlation, or causation?

I don't think we will ever know if it is either with 100% certainty. There is so little known about the women that use this law. About all that is known is that as information about the law was delivered to the public (it is heavily advertised) the number of dead babies dropped. I'm sure that we will stay on the same course until something changes.

There is simply no reason to believe that any babies who have been dumped in chutes would otherwise have been abandoned or killed. This program may do nothing more than make it easier for people who would have relinquished their children safely in any event to do so with less muss and fuss.

We don't really know much about the mental states of these women. There was one baby that was reclaimed by the family of the mother and apparently the mother had issues. In any event, if a mother doesn't want the baby I would rather make it as easy as possible for her to give it away if the alternative may result in harm to the child. Keep in mind that we have some real nutcases here; we are short one since he moved to Washington but we still have no shortage of mothers that drown their kids in the bathtub or bash their heads in with rocks.

And no, I wouldn't even see "one aspect of a larger problem" being lessened. I'd see a whole lot of still unsolved problems, and perhaps even some new ones, and one symptom possibly alleviated.

Well, we do what we can. We are not a wealthy state. There is not much money in agriculture any more, oil production is getting too expensive to be competitive, and we don't have the water to ever have much in the way of manufacturing...so not much is going to change.

I'm afraid that you haven't done any better a job of establishing that this is likely to have any effect on the situations it is meant to address

Well, the program is inexpensive enough to continue the experiment and it is giving some babies a better deal in life...so we'll stay the course. If we get some better options I'm sure they will be given consideration.

[iverglas]

21. yup, it's those damned women

Keep in mind that we have some real nutcases here; we are short one since he moved to Washington but we still have no shortage of mothers that drown their kids in the bathtub or bash their heads in with rocks.

Fathers just never abuse or kill their kids. Nope. And this bizarrely hyperbolic allegation had something to do with the laws in question. Nope.

It just isn't that hard to see what the thing is all about when one keeps reading.

No money for stuff that would really protect lots of kids. Quick fixes for a problem that is at best a symptom of the real problems and that has never been shown to be amenable to this kind of fix anyway, and that is only "fixed" if we define it so narrowly as to ignore the problems that the fix creates.

I have no problem with assisting women to relinquish unwanted children safely. I have loads of problems with complete failure to do anything that would assist women in not having children that are unwanted, or to assist children at whose mothers it isn't quite so easy to point fingers, or with unsubstantiated claims that the fix is even going to solve the carefully defined problem itself.

[JayS]

22. Well, you sure missed the point again.

Yes, we have plenty of fathers that do some cruel things. We had a beheading of a child here the other day and even one child stuffed in an oven; both acts committed by the father. Since the law is about mothers, I restricted my post to talking about them.

You must have missed the part where I pointed out that we are trying to use limited resources to address the other issues you raise. There is no "complete failure" to even try. If you can submit a workable and novel business plan that takes into account the realities of our situation I will see that it gets attention. I am certain that you know that a business plan is not just a bunch of nice sayings like those used by politicians.

And some words to live by...

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to tell the difference.
Amen

[TexasMexican]

10. I agree.