Abandoned Infants: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

Five infants--three alive, two dead--have turned up abandoned in the past three months in parking lots and hedges across Orange County.

Child-welfare workers express alarm over the string of tragedies and say they are at a loss to explain why they occurred. In their search for solutions, officials are looking beyond the specific cases to the public’s reaction to them.

“It seems that in some ways, the public is becoming desensitized to child abandonment. It’s become similar to the nightly news rundowns of drive-by shootings,” said Larry Leaman, director of the county’s Social Services Agency.

“Until the public views this as a priority, there is a certain amount of quiet acceptance,” Leaman said. “Without outrage . . . it’s probably not going to change as a trend.”

News reports of abandoned babies often result in dozens of phone calls from people interested in adoption or demanding that the parents be found and punished.

But experts said the public is less likely to focus on the underlying causes of child abandonment or call for improved services for pregnant teens.

“A lot of people are concerned, but fewer of them look at the broader picture of what is happening to these kids and how to respond to the needs of the parents,” said Deanne Tilton Durfee, executive director of Inter-agency Council of Child Abuse and Neglect in Los Angeles.

“I think people get very upset, want to blame someone and then move on to other concerns when they’ve gotten over their anger,” Durfee said.

All social activism--from child protection to African famine relief--are at the whim of the public’s changing interest and limited attention span. Baby abandonments often garner more attention than other ills because of the empathy people feel for helpless infants.

Still, Leaman expressed frustration at the lack of community outcry produced by the five recent cases, which he described as a “staggering” number for so early in the year. Typically, the county handles only half a dozen such incidents in an entire year.

“I can guarantee you that if someone went out and put graffiti all over Anaheim Stadium, we would see a lot of outrage,” Leaman said. “But you have two babies abandoned in Anaheim, and I don’t really think you’ve seen that much outcry.”

Child welfare workers are divided over why the public does not demand more action. Some said the “shock value” of discarded infants has diminished as society becomes numbed by increasing violence involving young people.

“Things that were shocking when they happened yesterday seem just like ordinary parts of the urban experience today,” said David Ballard, executive director of Holy Family Services, a nonprofit adoption and foster care service.

Others, however, say that the concern is there, but people are simply unsure how to help. “People don’t know they have the power to make a difference,” Durfee said.

Still another factor, experts say, is the news media’s varying interest in abandonment cases.

When a baby girl was found last month abandoned in a car seat in Anaheim, television news covered the event as a major story. The resulting publicity prompted dozens of people to inquire about the baby, said Tuey Lee, program manager for Orange County’s child registry.

But the discovery of another discarded infant a few weeks later in Tustin generated far less TV coverage and, consequently, little public reaction, she said.

“I didn’t really see what the difference was,” Lee said.

Perhaps the Anaheim case, she said, happened “on a slow media day.”

Experts do agree that preventing child abandonment requires action not just from government but also from schools, churches and neighbors.

One important task is to make pregnant women in trouble aware of the array of services available to them.

Adoption agencies are usually able to find permanent homes for infants, so mothers who don’t want to keep their babies have no need to discard them, officials said.

At the same time, people could pay attention to the infants in their neighborhoods, offer support to expectant mothers and call authorities if they believe a baby is in danger, Leaman said.

“We need a real sense of community,” he said. “We need to reach out and let them know we are here to help.”

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Some individuals and groups are trying to help by focusing attention on the plight of discarded newborns.

A Yorba Linda pastor, Patrick Callahan, petitions the courts for guardianship of dead “Baby Does,” gives them names and provides them with funeral services and burials.

Another commemoration is found amid the colorful patches of a giant quilt that memorializes 75 victims of violent crime in Santa Ana. One patch has an embroidered flower design and honors a baby girl found dead in the city last year.

“We see this as a loss to all of us,” said Mel Kernahan, who joined other community activists in making the quilt. “We don’t know who these kids could have become.”

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Babies Cast Aside

Five abandoned infants have been discovered in Orange County so far this year. The county usually handles only half a dozen such cases annually. One of the five incidents involved a mother who left her newborn with a boyfriend in January and didn’t return. The other four:

* Jan. 8: Decomposed body of baby girl wrapped in blankets and left in bushes at an Anaheim industrial park;

* March 3: Newborn girl wrapped with garbage bag found alive in the bed of a pickup truck at an Anaheim apartment complex;

* March 16: Body of a suffocated baby boy discovered in a trash bin behind a Santa Ana medical clinic;

* March 22: Baby girl found alive in a cardboard box under bushes in Tustin

Sources: Times reports; county Social Services Agency; researched by SHELBY GRAD / For The Times