Newborns Abandoned Despite Safe Haven Law

The discovery this week of a newborn boy abandoned in the parking lot of a Canoga Park hospital has heightened concern that laws in California and other states designed to encourage mothers to hand off unwanted infants safely are ineffective and too little known.

Two weeks earlier, another newborn boy was found in a Monrovia trash bin, allegedly placed there by a teenage mother who hid her pregnancy and has been charged with attempted murder.

The two cases have sparked a sense of urgency that the public should be better educated about the state’s year-old safe haven law, which allows a parent to hand over a baby at a hospital emergency room within 72 hours of birth with no questions asked and without fear of being prosecuted for child abandonment.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday requested recommendations from health care and child welfare experts on how to better implement the safe haven law.

“We must better educate the public and make resources available,” said Supervisor Don Knabe, who introduced the motion.

“We’ve got to get these babies through the doors of hospitals and into safe hands.”

Monday evening, an infant boy wrapped in a blanket was found in a paper bag between shrubs and a lamppost about 150 feet from the employee entrance of West Hills Hospital and Medical Center.

Los Angeles Police Department detectives said they are looking for the unknown mother but have not determined whether she or whoever left the baby will face charges of child endangerment.

Authorities hope to learn whether those involved knew about the law and were trying to comply or whether the parking lot merely presented a convenient dumping ground.

The bag was first spotted by a nurse about 1:30 p.m. Monday. When she returned to the hospital about 8 p.m., she heard the baby whimpering and looked inside, said Det. Jary Quinones. The nurse alerted police.

Physicians at West Hills are monitoring the infant, who is in good condition and will probably be placed in a foster home later this week.

Another area hospital, Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, has taken a very active approach to the new law by creating a drop-off for unwanted babies, an enclosed crib-like structure outside the hospital near its emergency room entrance.

However, no one has used it, to the frustration of emergency room nurses Theresa Bouse and Lisa Grace, who came up with the idea. At least five babies have been abandoned elsewhere in Los Angeles County in unprotected locations since the drop-off facility was unveiled in September.

“I was nauseated when I heard about the Monrovia case,” Grace said. “All that mother had to do was to walk into any hospital and walk out and her life and that of her baby would be so much different.”

She and other proponents of the safe haven law say the difficulty has been the getting word out and overcoming the fears of mothers like the 16 year-old in the Monrovia case.

Teen Mom Didn’t Know About Safe Haven Law

That teen’s attorney, Joe Hopkins, said the girl did not know about the law. He said she is a straight-A student who did not intend to harm the child, dubbed “Baby Andrew” by nurses at Huntington Memorial Hospital, where he was treated for skull fractures, hypothermia and dehydration.

The girl, Hopkins said, was impregnated by a 25-year-old man in an encounter that amounted to rape. He said the heavyset girl hid the pregnancy from her aunt, with whom she lived.

“She told the detectives that she hoped someone would find it, that she didn’t want it to die and didn’t know what else to do,” Hopkins said.

The attorney said that she had the baby in a bathroom while her aunt was elsewhere in the house and that she then ran out when the aunt went next door.

“The only place she can get to and get back to her room fast enough is the dumpster. She doesn’t drop the baby in the dumpster. She placed the baby gently in the dumpster as she wraps it in these towels and plastic bag,” Hopkins said.

To its backers, the safe haven law is an enlightened reform that should help such a desperate parent. It provides a 14-day period during which the parent can reconsider and retrieve the baby. After that, the parents’ rights are terminated and the baby can be placed for adoption.

Although numbers are sketchy, officials estimate that 24 babies were abandoned statewide last year, 16 in Los Angeles County, where 56 babies were reported abandoned during the last four years.

But at a time when 35 states have adopted so-called safe delivery laws, their effectiveness is far from certain. Critics say the laws are poorly thought out and could encourage some mothers who might have sought to relinquish their babies legally through adoption to hand them over anonymously.

Moreover, there is growing concern that the laws may skirt the rights of fathers to contest custody and may deprive children of vital genetic and medical history.

The laws vary from state to state, some allowing parents to drop babies up to 30 days old at firehouses, police stations, adoption agencies and child care providers.

But babies continue to be abandoned in alleys and parks by confused teens and others. In one case, the mother was a counselor at a women’s shelter.

“They are scared to death, scared the family will kick them out, afraid of the shame that it can bring to themselves and their families, or they are afraid of losing a relationship because the boyfriend may have said get rid of the baby. But in some instances, the girls are just very selfish, just thinking of themselves,” said Debi Faris, who created Garden of Angels, a Riverside County burial ground where 48 abandoned babies are interred.

In California, state officials say only four babies have been surrendered at hospitals since the law took effect, though Faris places the number at eight.

Babies were turned over safely to hospitals in San Joaquin, Nevada, Sacramento and Lassen counties.

Many states, including California, provide no money for publicizing the laws--a major shortcoming that has hampered effectiveness, say proponents, such as state Senate Republican Leader James L. Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), who carried the original law and a spending measure for a media campaign. Gov. Gray Davis last year vetoed the $1 million funding.

The Department of Social Services and other state agencies are working to devise a broad-based publicity campaign. But there has been no funding commitment.

Supporters of safe haven laws praise New Jersey, which publicized its law on cable television, radio, buses, billboards, newspapers and in movie theaters. Seven babies were turned in to New Jersey hospitals and several mothers specifically mentioned hearing or reading about the law.

But since the New Jersey law took effect in August 2000, five babies have been abandoned in unsafe places, including in a park next to a billboard advertising the safe haven law.

“We can spend all the money we want, but if a mother is very stressed out and thinking irrationally, we can’t really control that,” conceded New Jersey Department of Human Services spokesman Joseph Delmar.

In Northern California, a mother placed her newborn on the doorstep of the upscale home of a Lawrence Livermore Lab scientist last Christmas and rang the doorbell. It is likely the mother thought the baby would be alright, though that belief would not shield her from prosecution for child abandonment if she is caught.

Saving One Life Would Justify Law, Some Say

Prosecutors would have to look closely at the mother’s intent and circumstances in that and other cases in deciding whether to press charges.

“There is a difference between the person who leaves a baby in a church or hospital and a person who puts a baby in a dumpster or throws it out in the woods,” said Joyce Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Child Welfare League, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

“For that person, these laws may not have any impact at all.”

But to proponents, the laws justify themselves if only one baby is saved.

“Many of these laws are like the Model T and are a long ways from today’s Ford Thunderbird,” said William L. Pierce, president of the U.S. committee of the International Assn. of Voluntary Adoption Agencies and NGOs, a humanitarian group that aids orphans worldwide. “They will be tweaked and fine-tuned. But in the meantime, babies have been saved and adopted and women have avoided being jailed.”

Grace sneaked a peek at the baby boy in the Monrovia case while visiting colleagues at Huntington Memorial. “A beautiful baby,” she said. The phones had been ringing with people wanting to adopt him.

Grace, 39, and Bouse, 54, are planning to campaign on their own to publicize their receiving station.

The station, inspired by a German one, is fitted with a white, blanket-covered bassinet inside. When the door is closed it locks and triggers an alarm within the hospital’s emergency department so staff can respond immediately.

It would be a wonderful world if such cases could be prevented altogether, but that is not the reality, they said.

“Many mothers who abandon a baby will regret it, but you can’t take back a dead baby,” Grace said.

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Times staff writers Anica Butler and Evelyn Larrubia contributed to this report.