Help From a Place Where Hope Is Not Abandoned : Services: Officials at St. Francis Medical Center want their Baby Anthony Hotline to reach the woman desperate enough to abandon her child in a Dumpster.

It is a red telephone that has sat since December on a desk in a room of its own at St. Francis Medical Center. Attached to it is a medal of St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost children. It has rung more than 100 times.

Almost always, the caller is someone who wants to adopt a baby. And that is good. But hospital officials still await the first real test of the Baby Anthony Hotline when the caller will be a woman who has just delivered an unwanted baby and is considering abandoning it.

In an attempt to reach that woman, the Lynwood hospital is expanding its advertising and honing its message.

Last month, three billboards were erected in the South Bay area showing a sketch of outstretched arms dropping a baby into a garbage can marked with a big red X. The only words are “Call for help,” printed above the hot-line number, (800) 606-2229.

Hospital officials hope the new posters will get their message across quicker and more clearly than the last ones, which showed two nuns tenderly holding babies.

“We believe this is a more universal symbol of what we are trying to address, and that it will reach out to more groups of people,” says Linda Woo, public relations manager at the hospital.

“We do hear about other abandoned babies, maybe not in our city, but in outlying areas, so when we hear that, we want to make sure our message is being heard.”

They wish the mother of a baby found dead Saturday in a Hollywood trash bin would have seen one of their signs. Before giving birth, the woman reportedly asked friends if any of them wanted the child.

They wish the telephone would have been in place on Sept. 12, 1992, to take a call from a woman who gave birth to a boy found in a South Gate trash container.

The baby was found by a couple of teen-agers and rushed to St. Francis. The child, covered with ants and ant bites, survived and became known around the hospital as Baby Anthony.

The incident prompted the hospital, in conjunction with local service organizations and an ambulance service, to establish its abandoned baby program.

“If you have a baby and don’t know what to do with it, and you’re in a panic situation, what are you going to do? We want to reach out to that state of mind,” says Anne Bruner, a medical social worker at the hospital.

St. Francis will send an ambulance to pick up the baby and, if wanted, will provide confidential counseling and medical care for the mother as well.

If the mother chooses not to keep the baby, adoption proceedings are initiated.

Bruner has counseled eight callers with varying problems through the hot line; two opted for adoption services.

“Adoption isn’t always a comfortable thing in this culture,” Bruner says. “A mother releasing her baby is still looked down upon, and we would like them to get more comfortable with (adoption).”

The hot line doesn’t just counsel women considering abandoning their babies. It also is a referral service to other programs--such as adoption and prenatal care.

The hospital is working with schools, fast-food restaurants, video stores--places where the message is likely to reach young people by distributing flyers, Woo says. The hospital also hopes to have posters placed on buses and garbage bins.

Twenty to 30 babies are found abandoned each year in Los Angeles County, says Schuyler Sprowles, information director for the Department of Children Services, which also sponsors a hot line ((800) 540-4000).

Each year, four or five abandoned baby deaths are investigated by the Coroner’s Office, says Dean Gilmour, captain of the Investigation Division.

At St. Francis, the numbers are not great. Prior to Baby Anthony, an average of one abandoned baby a year was brought in.

“We wanted to speak to the fact that one baby abandoned is too many, that one woman living with the heartache of not knowing what happened to her baby, whether it was found, is too many,” says Sister Elizabeth Joseph Keaveney, president and chief executive officer of the hospital. “That’s a wound that will not heal.”

Although hospital officials hope the program successfully reaches out to women considering abandoning their babies, there have been no cases at St. Francis since Baby Anthony.

And that, too, is good.