Hot on the heels of the horrible stories out of Wisconsin, I heard a story on the news tonight about a brand new baby found in a dumpster in St. Louis, Missouri.

It seems that a mother dumped her brand new, as in only hours old, into a dumpster. A woman who is believed to be the mother of the baby boy has been found.

The baby was found purely by the grace of God. A man was throwing some lawn clippings into the dumpster when he heard a sound, not knowing that it was a baby. He dug through the dumpster and found the baby wrapped in a towel, cold, but alive. The man, Wesley Falker, said that the baby wrapped his little hand around his finger. The baby was taken to a local hospital and is healthy.

Stories like this make me so incredibly angry. Missouri has a “Safe Haven” law that allows a mother to relinquish her child without fear of conviction. The baby is placed in foster care while the legal process is done, but the parents are not charged with abandonment. It allows the baby to be placed in a safe home.

I understand young women being afraid and hiding a pregnancy. There are parents, or fathers, who would not handle the news of a pregnancy well, but there is no reason for a child to be disposed of as trash. If a mother truly feels that she is unable to make an adoption plan why not take advantage of the Safe Haven law and allow the child to live? Now the mother faces criminal charges, which would not have happened if she had relinquished the baby.

In most safe haven cases, the mother is not even required to give her name, medical history or any other information. She only has to state that she is the baby’s mother and that she is voluntarily relinquishing the child. Missouri’s laws are extremely liberal. It allows the mother to relinquish up until the child is a year old. Most states only allow relinquishing a child up until the age of two weeks or a month.

What can make a woman so desperate that she feels the only option is to throw a child in the trash? It absolutely baffles me.

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