A hypothetical woman is too-late-to-abort pregnant, or just gave birth and finds out her baby has a profound mental disability. Like Down Syndrome, or mental retardation. Assume she does not wish to raise the baby because of its handicap. Also assume she does not wish to throw it into a dumpster, hurt it, or kill it. She wants it to have as good of a life as possible, but she did not plan on having a child that she would have to take care of until it died. She does not wish to raise it; she would prefer to get rid of it as fast as possible without wasting effort on what she sees as her failure to produce a healthy child, and work on creating a fully functioning “normal” child that she will want to take care of.
How would she legally go about giving up the baby?
Assume also there is no partner to consider in the picture.
One option would be to take advantage of an infant save haven law. These laws vary widely from state to state, but generally allow a parent to surrender a baby to a designated location, which ultimately turns the child over to the child welfare department. Hospitals are often designated as safe havens, and I have personally walked by a fire station with a plaque identifying it as a safe haven.
In some but not all states, the identity of a parent who gives up a child to a safe haven is shielded.
Most developed countries do have child protection laws under which the state accepts the ultimate responsibility of caring for abandoned children.
Those laws don’t necesassarily give parents an affirmative right to abandon children they don’t want, but they do ensure that if parents do abandon their children (and make sure that the state knows about it) then their children will at least receive some kind of minimal care.
Laws requiring the state to care for the child are not necessarily inconsistent with the state pressing the parents to discharge their duty to care for their child. However the legal structure generally includes a rule that the interests of the child are paramount, and the authorities will usually conclude that if parents really, really don’t want their child (as opposed to having abandoned it in a panicked reaction to a crisis) then it’s not in the interests of the child to press the parents to care for it. Hence the state may limit itself to, e.g., making the parents contribute financially to the cost of caring for their child (assuming the parents are in a position to do this).
There may be other places where parents do have a right to abandon their children, or at least to do so in certain circumstances. Parents would be wise to check the local law before acting precipitately.
I have heard of these laws but only in a very general way. Are there not legal arrangements that have to be made or something in these kinds of cases? Like… does she have to drop off a birth certificate with the child or identify herself or what? Could the mother just walk in anonymously, leave the kid, and walk away?
I’m pretty sure you could call up adoption agencies and see if they had any prospective parents looking to adopt who would be interested in adopting a special needs child. My impression is that they almost certainly would have such parents waiting.
Usually the event is announced heavily in the news and the baby pictured, so if there are other relatives who do want to claim the kid they can come forward. But yes, provided the child is left in a proper “safe haven” she (or he - this is open to men as well) can do exactly that.
Because it beats finding newborns in trash cans. Which still happens once in awhile, but not nearly as frequently.
I really have no idea how long adoption takes. But if it’s quick that could be an option. I guess I was/am assuming that nobody would want to adopt a child with a severe mental handicap.
A woman from the local Downs Syndrome alliance came to our class for a guest lecture, and told us there are waiting lists a mile long for parents who *specifically *want to adopt a baby/kid with Downs. Many of them have at least one other with Downs, and have a special fondness for the particular challenges and rewards that come with that special need.
(I think she told us this because, as nursing students, we may one day be in the situation of answering this kind of question for real.)
ETA: Sorry for the simulpost, rachelellogram. I guess this answers your question, at least where one disability is concerned. There certainly are people looking to adopt kids with special needs. Not every special need, perhaps, is as popular as Downs, but yes, there are people who want to be parents to special needs kids.
How exactly does one go about putting a child up for adoption? Do adoptive parents need to be lined up beforhand, or can the mother just sign a bunch of paperwork in the maternity ward and had the baby over to the state? I’ve also wondered if there’s a time limit involved. Could a parent just put a toddler or preteen up for adoption the same way, or does that only work with infants. Nebraska had to quickly rewrite it’s safe haven law to make it infants-only when older kids, (including out-of-state teens) started getting dropped off at hospitals.
Again, laws vary, but typically the birth parents aren’t fully discharged from parental responsiblities (and rights) until the adoption order is made and the adoptive parents take on those rights and responsibilities. There is no intermediate period where the child is parentless.
That doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that until that point the child is cared for by its birth-parents. Circumstances vary, but it’s common for the child to be given up by its birth parents, and to have been in the care of the adoptive parents for some time before the final adoption order.
If the adoption has been lined up before the child is born it can all happen very quickly but this isn’t always the case. In particular, if the parents only decide after teh child si born that they don’t want it any adoption agency is going to want them to consider their options carefully before they make a decision that they may later regret (and try to rescind). In general placement with birth parents has better outcomes for children than state care, fostering or adoption, so parents will be encouraged to explore this, to consider what problems they face, what supports are available, etc, and not to make an adoption decision that isn’t fully considered and reflected upon. Then there’ll be the matter of finding the right adoptive parents and - if they haven’t already been assessed - assessing them. So the whole thing can take a while.
Yes, you can place older children and teenagers for adoption. But - barring an agreed adoption within the extended family - the older they are the harder they are to place, and the more likely it is that they will never be adopted.
The result of all this is that if you want to be rid of your parental responsibilities quickly and your country has an anonymous safe haven regime, you are better off using that than participating in the adoption process. But that’s if you want the quickest outcome, rather than the outcome which might be best in other respects for you and/or your child.
Very cool. I didn’t know that. I mean I guess it makes sense given that humans are wildly varied, but I never would have guessed that someone would **actually **actively seek out a special needs adoption.
This, while not exactly hysterical (it’s more tragic), does make me laugh because wow. Some freaking people. Do you have a source on this? I’d be interested in reading up more about this.
Were the older children left at the havens grandfathered in to the system since the law technically allowed it at the time? Or did they get sent back home?
Usually, yeah. The legal arrangements for the child have to be made, but that comes later. Safe haven laws basically allow a mother to abandon a child someplace it won’t die without legal repercussions, but termination of the parents rights still has to be made in court, generally with attorneys appointed to represent the interests of both the absent parents and the baby. If a baby is abandoned and there’s nobody looking for it, it’s usually a pretty easy decision for the judge that parental rights should be severed and that it should be placed in foster care and put up for adoption, but the termination hearing still has to be held.
Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about these Safe Haven laws. The last paragraph in the Controversy section mentions the Nebraska situation, with references.
Arrangements could all be made long before the child was born: at the adoption agency you’d likely be given dossiers about several prospective families and allowed to select which one (if any) you’d feel most comfortable with. If you (and they) are interested in an open adoption, you would even have every opportunity to meet them before the birth. The child could, and almost certainly would, leave the hospital with his/her adoptive parents.
One potential problem with using the Safe Haven method is that you may have to make the decision very quickly. In some states it’s only in effect for a few days after birth, in many others it’s a month or so. Only North Dakota and Missouri give you a year. So if the disability isn’t obvious, the mother may not know until after this time period.
Spanish news services talk about this whenever an abandoned infant is found; if I understand correctly (I am not a family lawyer), the process that’s followed if the mother is found is actually quite similar to what would be done if she’d said “I want to give my child up” while in the hospital (or if she walked into/called a hospital/social services/the nearest police station).
The involvement of the cops is not hostile: they send the ones from women’s services, not the homicide detectives; often it’s easier and faster to get in a cop from WS to perform the first intervention than a psychologist from SS (the cops work 24/7, the psychologists don’t). They ensure that everybody involved is calm and that all available options are considered; if the mother wants to give the child up, the WS/SS people start the paperwork to give up parental rights, find a foster home, etc. This applies whether the child is in perfectly good health or not; if there is a known father (I know the OP said no, but for completeness’ sake) and he disagrees, or if the mother is a dependent minor and her parents disagree (with her and/or with each other), things can take a lot longer. If there are no disagreements, the child is “available to good home” faster if the mother has given her up than if she’s abandoned her (no “wait time to see whether the mother can be found”), the complete paperwork takes a few weeks.
In Spain, parental rights and duties can be terminated without new parents being available. The parent-less child is a ward of the State.