Hoag Hospital Ends Birth Announcements : Security: Concerned about baby stealing, it is the last of the county’s big maternity hospitals to stop providing newborns’ names to newspapers.

It used to be that proud parents clipped a birth announcement from the local newspaper and glued the treasured clipping into a baby book. But these days, those crinkly, yellow mementos might not be worth the risk.

Concerned by the threat of baby stealing, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian last month became the last of the county’s big maternity hospitals to end the practice of providing the names of newborns to local newspapers. Some hospitals even warn new parents who choose to alert the newspapers themselves that seeking the public announcements might not be wise.

“Usually this would be a happy announcement, but people have to watch what they say about those things these days,” said Maureen Mazzatenta, Hoag Hospital spokeswoman. The hospital also stopped distributing “It’s a Boy” and “It’s a Girl” bumper stickers as gifts to new parents. “The hospital staff is acutely in tune to security concerns and abductions at other hospitals.”

Hoag has been placing birth announcements as a courtesy since the hospital opened in 1952, but the staff there decided recently that heightened concern about crime and security supersedes the desire for newspaper souvenirs.

“It is sad that people have to be so careful,” Mazzatenta said, adding that the hospital has never had an abduction.

While most big hospitals gave up birth announcements years ago, a few still provide the information only with parental consent and most leave it up to parents to supply newspapers with the information.

“Twenty years ago that was the big deal,” Dr. B.J. Snell, a director at UCI Medical Center’s birthing center in Anaheim. “Today, infant security is a huge issue.”

Yet, baby stealing is quite rare.

In the past 11 years, 19 babies have been abducted in California from either a hospital or, more commonly, the mother’s home, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the FBI. Earlier this month, an infant was snatched from a Los Angeles hospital was but recovered after a security camera captured the kidnaper’s image on tape.

In only four cases in the past 10 years did abductors use published announcements to target victims, according to the national statistics.

“It is not an epidemic,” said Ruben Rodriguez, senior analyst at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “But try telling that to a parent who has had their child abducted. . . . And hospitals have gotten burned” in lawsuits that found them liable for having published infants’ names in the first place, he said.

When Cathy Fitzpatrick of Lake Forest gave birth to her daughter last July at Hoag Hospital, she and her husband kept that day’s newspaper as a souvenir but never got around to clipping the actual birth notice from the paper.

“I sent out my own personal birth announcements to people I know,” Fitzpatrick said. “It really doesn’t surprise me (that Hoag stopped having announcements published); there really are people out there who are wacky. . . . It is sad that you have to remain so paranoid.”

At a few hospitals countywide, the tradition lives on. Placentia Linda Community Hospital in Placentia sends the information to the local newspaper, but only with the parents’ consent, said Catherine McMiller, director of medical records. Samaritan Medical Center in San Clemente and Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center routinely provide a short notice for the community newspaper.

One community newspaper, the Irvine World News, said it receives three to 15 announcements a week. Reporter Peggy Goetz said that even before Hoag Hospital stopped sending a monthly list of births, she and editors at the newspaper discussed the risks of printing notices that contain the baby’s name and sex, birth date and the parents’ names and home city.

“We checked with the hospitals to make sure they had permission from parents,” she said. “We still get cards from parents who send their own in. . . . There are still people who really want those (announcements) in there.”

Hospitals, in deference to patients’ privacy, generally provide a package of information to parents that includes both an announcement card for the newspaper--and a warning. The warning might include a recommendation that parents shy away from publishing birth announcements or hanging signs on front doors advertising the arrival of a baby.

“I think some of (the mothers) are still excited to see their new baby’s name in the paper,” said Jennifer Lefebvre, spokeswoman at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills. “But I do know that with an increase in concern over child safety, a lot of people have opted” not to send the newspapers the announcement cards.