Protecting Newborns From Kidnapers : Security: Abductors often are in nurse disguise and have miscarried, a Newport conference hears. A new state law requires tighter controls.

Two years ago this week, Annette Jones was living a nightmare.

A woman posing as a nurse had abducted her newborn boy, Christopher, from a hospital where she was recuperating from a Cesarean-section birth. Although her son was returned two weeks later, Jones said she can’t forget the incident and fears that some hospitals have not done enough to prevent such abductions.

“It had been so easy. Nobody really thought about how lax their security was until something happened,” Jones, 34, said in a recent telephone interview from her home in Little Rock, Ark. “To go home without that child--that was a nightmare.”

On Friday, more than 250 administrators and nurses from hospitals across the nation met at the Newport Beach Marriott Hotel and Tennis Club to discuss ways to prevent the kidnaping of newborns. The conference follows the recent passage of a California law requiring tighter security at hospitals that deliver babies.

Under the law, Assembly Bill 4071, the state Department of Health must adopt regulations by July, 1991, requiring hospitals to prepare plans to reduce the risk of infant abduction. This is the first such legislation passed in the nation, although Pennsylvania is expected to approve a nearly identical law, conference officials said.

Sponsored by Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach and Farmers Insurance Co., the conference included a forum led by John Rabun, vice president of National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Rabun said at least 11 babies have been abducted this year from U.S. hospitals, according to statistics compiled by the Washington-based center.

At least 59 infants have been stolen from U.S. hospitals since accurate records began being kept in 1983. More than one-sixth of those abductions were in California--none of them, however, in Orange County.

Rabun hailed the law as an inexpensive way to ensure the safety of newborns, calling abduction risk a problem easily solved by staff attention. He stressed the need for hospital staff members to take preventive action.

“We don’t need to batten down the hatches or board everything up,” but parents should be warned not to give newborns to anyone they cannot identify as a member of the hospital staff.

Still, Rabun said, the hospitals he has toured in the county this week--including Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center, Humana Hospital-Huntington Beach, Humana Hospital-West Anaheim and Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange--are in “good shape.”

“There was nothing alarming,” he said. “There are always some things we can do to make the target a little harder. But they were in awfully good shape--which is comforting. You can’t say that about a lot of places in the country.”

Because the abductions are surprisingly uniform in execution, they are also easier to prevent than other crimes, he said. The offender is almost always female, often disguised as a nurse, usually visits the nursery for days before the abduction and asks detailed questions about hospital procedures.

Stolen infants are never physically harmed, he said. Often the abductor genuinely believes that the baby is hers.

Rabun said he believes that abductors should be prosecuted, but he added that he can understand their most common motivation: a desire to replace a baby lost during pregnancy.

“You tend to look at anyone who would steal a baby as heinous--a real slime bag,” he said. “But these are not desperadoes. . . . They’ve been good mommas. They are married, most of them, they have been pregnant in the sense that they miscarried between six and seven months, but they don’t tell their spouse.”

Some abductors even wait until the mother and child return home from the hospital--and use violence in addition to deception to steal the baby, Rabun said. Seventeen infants have been stolen from homes or clinics since 1983, and five of those incidents ended in murder of the mother.

The center’s records show that 90% of abducted babies are returned within two weeks. All but four of the newborns abducted by non-family members since 1983 have been returned.

Still, the extent of long-term damage to families is unknown, Rabun said. “Parents get overly protective of the babies. They say ‘They’re never out of my sight,’ and they mean it. Literally.”