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I have been turning the Nebraska child abandonment cases over in my head since I heard about them last week. First, two children were abandoned--a mother abandoned her 11-year-old son at one Nebraska hospital and an aunt left her 15-year-old nephew at another. Both adults indicated they couldn't handle behavior problems. Next, Gary Staton, widower and father of 10 dropped off nine of his children because he could not afford to care for them any longer and feared they'd become homeless. He said he believed the children would be better off without him.
I wouldn't want to be the parent who's come to the point where abandoning my child seems like the only option. I wouldn't want to be the abandoned child. I don't have a solution for these families because I don't know their full circumstances or their hearts, but I have been a depressed young mother at her wits end, a poor parent having to ask for financial help. I've also been a child feeling that my mother doesn't love me (I was wrong.), and I've been the child who's kept her parents up at night with worry. Today I'm the adult who looks back to see that my mother needed better parental coping skills, that both my parents did the best they knew how to do or could manage at one moment in time. So do I.
People, many of them angry at what they call parental irresponsibility, see the Nebraska abandonments as the inevitable result of a state law passed in July that allows parents to surrender their offspring at designated safe havens without penalty. Nebraska was the last state in the country to pass a safe haven law, laws written to address public concern about young mothers who've dropped their newborns in dumpsters to die and the need to protect children.
Texas, the same state in which a judge recently ordered a young woman to stop having babies, was the first state to pass a safe haven law. The Texas law allows mothers to leave infants up to 60 days in age.
Nebraska lawmakers didn't want to appear backward, according to state senator Pete Pirsch (R-Omaha) in an August 18 NPR interview, and so they developed their own version of such laws with one big difference: Under the Nebraska safe haven law, parents may abandon children as old as 19 years of age without fear of prosecution.
In his August 18 interview, a month before the first reported case of an older child's abandonment, Pirsh, who wrote the amendment that upped the age, said the state had seen no problems at that time with parents abandoning older children. He explained to NPR that Nebraska had experienced a 2005 case in which a 2-day-old infant had been found in a canal. "The baby had been dead for two days," he told reporter Alex Cohen. And in 2007, a woman found a baby in a tote bag next to a trash bin.
He also told NPR that he advocated expansion of the bill to include older children, reasoning that if parents/caregivers are "at a point where they, out of frustration or anger, may actually injure the child then this is a vastly superior system to set up because it will take the child from that position of danger and place them in a safe environment."
That was then, this is now.
As a result of September's child abandonment run, Nebraska legislators are scrambling to correct what may have been a mistake. An October 2 New York Times article examines the fallout of 14 children abandoned in one weekend, nine of which were Gary Staton's children. The article suggests that the Nebraska abandonments illuminate the stress levels for some families in financial crisis, situations perhaps worsened by our current national economic disaster, and the lack of access to adequate mental health services for even medically-insured families.
Staton surrendering nine of his 10 children has received the most attention. Over at StrollerDerby, one blogger used Staton's situation to share why she doesn't want a
large family and suggests simply that Staton was irresponsible to have such a large family. The piece did not examine, and didn't have to, that Staton's wife died more than a year ago shortly after the birth of their 10th child, that the family
