Baby Moses Laws Public Comment by Russell SiasBaby Moses Laws Cut Infant Abandonment Deaths by 66 Percent
Safe haven laws have been working quietly across this country since Texas passed the first one
in 1999.
That law came after 13 incidents of infant abandonment in a single year — three of them fatal.
Every state followed.
Since 1999, roughly 5,000 babies have been safely surrendered under safe haven laws
nationwide.
In that same period, infanticide rates dropped 66.7 percent from the decade before safe haven
laws existed.
Baby boxes are the next evolution of that same idea.
Safe Haven Baby Boxes — the Indiana -based nonprofit founded by Monica Kelsey, a firefighter
who was herself abandoned as an infant — has installed more than 350 boxes across 24 states.
Those boxes have facilitated well over 150 anonymous surrenders since the first one went live
in 2016.
In Indiana, where baby boxes have been operating the longest, not a single infant death from
illegal abandonment has been recorded since the program launched.
Those numbers tell the story laws can't.
Georgia had none of this — until now.
The Baby Who Changed Georgia
Eliza Jane Warner was born December 28, 2018.
She was just days old when her mother placed her in a cooler, zipped it shut, and left it on the
side of Boy Scout Road in Troup County.
The cooler sat there for nearly a week before a passerby opened it.
The 911 call says everything: "It's a dead baby. It's a dead baby — I'm about to have a heart
attack."
The cause of death was asphyxiation.
Her mother — a teenager who had hidden the pregnancy from her family — was eventually
identified through genetic genealogy and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
Georgia had a safe haven law on the books when Eliza Jane was born.
Her mother didn't use it.
We don't know exactly why.
What we do know is that a teenager hiding a pregnancy from her family is far less likely to
walk through a fire station door and hand her baby to a uniformed stranger than she is to open
an unlocked panel in a wall at 2 a.m. with no one watching.