Another concern with safe havens is that a person who shows up at a site does not have to prove their relationship to the child. Therefore, a parent, spouse or significant other could conceivably take a child from a mother and drop the baby off at a safe haven site. Safe haven sites are generally hospital emergency rooms or police or fire stations.

Women who choose this option, in my opinion, are mentally unstable and in dire need of psychiatric help. I cannot fathom that any women in her right mind would choose to drop her baby off anonymously and not provide any pertinent information that all children deserve to know.

If women drop their babies off and then disappear back into society, I have concerns about what happens to these mothers. Should I feel that anyone who does this is a heartless cold individual undeserving of any compassion? It is certainly a reprehensible and cowardly act. However, is it the act of an evil person or one is who mentally ill? I choose to believe that a person so desperate to consider anonymously abandoning their baby needs some serious psychiatric intervention. It is disturbing to me to think that we would so eagerly take her baby and, yet, send her back out into the world with no counseling, support or help.

Ms. C is not the stereotypical young confused, poor desperate woman that safe haven laws were designed to serve. As a former newspaper reporter, and one who may have authored articles on this subject, we can hardly say that she was unaware of safe havens available in her area. No one could say that she did not know that she was pregnant and panicked; she had already given birth to three other children. Purportedly, she told her husband that she had a medical condition that caused her weight gain.

Proponents of safe haven laws argue that the only reason these laws do not work is that we need to pour more money into advertising safe havens. Hard to argue that Ms. C did not know that safe haven were readily available in her area. Was she in a mental state though to choose that option? Apparently not.

Nor could we attribute her actions to being desperately poor or unable to provide for her child. This is an assumption we might make for many women who might choose to abandon their babies. The question then remains, “Why did she choose this despicable fate for her baby?” Why did not she take her newborn to a “safe haven”? Why are babies still ending up as her child did?