Safe Haven laws are meant to allow a mother to leave her child with a responsible party and allow the child to be placed for adoption. The main purpose of the law is to prevent mothers who are afraid of coming forward from potentially killing their babies. There are mothers who are afraid to admit to being pregnant and the Safe Haven laws give them an option to allow their child to live, rather than hiding.

Nebraska’s new law takes things quite a bit further. It allows for the mother to surrender a child up the age of 19. Most states set the limit at anywhere between 72 hours and one year of age. None are as liberal as Nebraska’s new law.

Can you picture the mother or father who is fed up with their snarky, rebellious, fourteen year old child dropping them off at a hospital and giving up custody? What are the ramifications if the parents try it to prove a point to the child or to try a “scared straight” intervention with them? There are days where I would have happily dropped Sammy off at the nearest police station and driven away without looking back, but that was momentary frustration. If this law remains in effect this is opening a whole can of worms that parents cannot begin to anticipate.

On the other hand, part of me wonders if it might prevent some child abuse if a frustrated parent were able to surrender their child. I doubt it would, because most parents who have abused their children don’t voluntarily surrender them, they are removed from the parents’ custody.

What about older children who have severe developmental or medical needs? What about children with issues such as Cerebral Palsy or Down’s Syndrome? What provisions are made for the care of these children? I completely get a parent being tired and frustrated of caring for a difficult child. Heck, Hannah is on the mild end behaviorally and there are days when she pushes me until I want to leave the house. The children in foster care are usually much harder. Hannah is on the emotionally healthy end, most foster children are not.

In a country where the foster care system is already overtaxed and have a shortage of foster homes, will this new law have an impact on the system?

I think this is a bad law that can end up backfiring in so many different ways. Adam Pertman of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute agrees. He had the following to say:

Casting such a wide net "circumvents every rational practice in child welfare that I'm aware of," he said. "That's as nicely as I can put it."

The new law would permit families like us to surrender Hannah if we wanted to. We are her legal guardians at this point as her adoption is not quite final yet. The Nebraska law does not limit parents to being the party who surrenders the child. Does this mean that a frustrated babysitter could drop of a child? That is not what Safe Haven laws intended. I’m all for child abuse prevention, but I’m not sure this is the way to go about it.

Read the full article here.



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