After a newborn baby girl was found in a dumpster at Mira Vista Apartments in Austin, Texas, 25 community leaders discussed the Baby Moses Law (known in other states as the Safe Haven Law) at a meeting on Saturday.
Suzanne Hobbs has been at the forefront of the fight for abandoned infants. She spent 17 years as a news reporter in Idaho Falls and worked tirelessly alongside Senator Bart Davis to bring Safe Haven laws to Idaho. At the beginning of her career, she arrived at a scene where an infant had been abandoned in a dumpster. Hobbs had been married for seven years and had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive. She couldn’t help but think how she would have gladly taken that baby. After a year or two, she did adopt a Safe Haven baby.
Heather Burner is a pediatric nurse from Arizona. She remembers all too well the images of a newborn abandoned in a hospital trash can. Burner and Hobbs are working together to educate mothers, especially teenagers, about the array of options they have for their children. The idea is that if our children grow up knowing these laws are in place, they will start safely surrendering the babies they don’t want to parent instead of leaving them to die.
In March, a baby’s body was found in a reservoir in Connecticut. Dawn Geras, founder of Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, is sharing with many the benefits of teaching these laws in schools. All 50 states currently have Safe Haven laws on the books. Everyone recognizes how many lives have been saved over the years by such laws, but if incidents like this are still occurring, there is clearly more work to be done.
