Parents are dropping off children, including teens, at hospitals because they can no longer afford to care for them. Just over the past nine days, the pace of abandonments has accelerated with five teens and preteens dropped off.
The state's Safe Haven law allows for such abandonments, but lawmakers originally intended it for infants.
One parent even drove from Georgia to abandon her child. We might be moved to condemn these parents. But any mother who would drive from Georgia to give up her child must care something about the innocent life. Sometimes things get so bad that you can't even take care of yourself. And layoffs are sweeping the nation as are home foreclosures.
To stop this tragedy in this specific case, a special legislative session has been called for Nov, 14 to change the law to halt the abandonments. Forty of 49 state lawmakers support changing the law.
The New York Times reports:
Safe-haven laws, allowing a parent to surrender an infant without fear of prosecution, were adopted by every state over the last decade after numerous reports of babies left to die in trash bins or plastic bags. But only Nebraska’s version, which took effect in July, extended the protection to “children,” meaning up to age 18, rather than specifying a maximum age of a few days or months.
To read more, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/us/30haven.html
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