But, to clear up any misconceptions, 'tis Ms “bitch”. I know, confusing as hell, isn’t it?
I am going to have to agree with wring on this one also. The laws are going to have to be based on each circumstance and be able to show that the parent left the child through free will in an unhealthy environment with no care or concern to the well being of the child for a certain amount of time. I do not think that a parent who left their child in a vehicle for a moment to run into a store to grab something real quick should not lose parental rights (hell, my mother did this before, and yes I think it is a moment of possible stupidity) just receive a nice harsh lecture on stupidity, but a parent who leaves a child in a parked car w/ the temp around 95 degrees and goes into a store for about a half an hour or more should definitely be considered for a loss of parental rights.
With every case that comes up, it will take careful consideration to determine the intentions of the parent, but a childs well being should always be put ahead of the parent child connection.
Just the show there’s nothing new under the sun, here’s a tear-jerking ballad of the 1890s (rev up the player pi-anner!):
The night was cold and stormy, the driven snow lay deep
A woman crept in silence along an empty street
And from the robe she carried, a baby’s cry there came
'Twas “Hush” the woman whispered, “Dear child without a name”
She took the baby from her where it was safe and warm
And left it on a doorstep alone out in the storm
All night the snow kept fallin’, the baby seemed to cry
“Oh, mama, why’d you leave me out here in the cold to die?”
But Mother could not hear her for she had gone away
Alone in shame to suffer a sin with grief to pay
The baby cried no longer, the snow kept comin’ down
And soon the little bundle was just a white snow mound
Next morn the door was opened and on the steps they found
The baby’s lifeless body beneath the little mound
And when they looked upon her, her face so sweet and fair
Her lips just seemed to ask them “Why did nobody care?”
Baby on the doorstep, lonely little one
Whose little heart keeps cryin’ “Mama, where’ve you gone?”
No one there to love you, no one to keep you warm
Baby on the doorstep, dyin’ in the storm
**
A quote from the article posted above:
“She’s not a violent person,” said Marie Stanton, 19, a friend of the teen. “She’s a good girl.”
Excuse me, but throwing a helpless human being to a DOG to be EATEN doesn’t exactly support the statement of this “friend”.
As for the topic at hand, I understand why women do this. Being a woman who doesn’t want children at (almost) any cost, I understand. However, there is quite a big difference between brutally killing the baby or abandoning it in a place to die versus leaving the baby where it can be found right away. If you carry a child to term because you have no other choice, you could at least leave the child in a place where it can be found right away. For example, in China, millions of little girls are born every day to families who cannot keep them. The girls are either suffocated, sometimes sold to other families or, in most cases, they are left in a highly public place. They are left on doorsteps of hotels, stores, orphanages, on parkbenches, etc.
On the misanthropic hand, those children who die by the hand of their mothers aren’t old enough to have missed out on anything - their lives would probably not have been all that good anyway if they were born to mothers who feel the desperation to the point of taking the baby’s life - we won’t miss them and they leave nothing behind. Tossed around through Social Services or a quick departure beyond this place? Really, how bad are they suffering?
On the humanistic hand, leaving the child in a place where it will be found gives that child a chance to have what could be a very good life.
shrug
I’m just grateful to not have to face this myself. And no, I don’t think that this mother should get her child back. She gave it up. That says she didn’t want it. Too bad lady, you should have thought it through more carefully. Let the baby go where it is wanted.
Isn’t the parent-child connection a significant part of the child’s well-being?
Sure, absolutely. A healthy parent-child connection, that is.
Research shows that even in an abuse/neglect situation, the whole mechanism of attachment to the parent is still present, although it’s a bit whacked (ie, tenuous, fearful). The equation for a child’s well-being at that point becomes a little more imbalanced in favor of a better care-situation in the interests of the child’s safety; this, IMHO outweighs the interest of maintaining the existing bonds associated with the parent-child relationship which has degenerated to the quality of crap by that time anyway.
I guess my bottom line beef has already been stated pretty concisely by earlier posters: that, at some point during a history of maltreatment of one’s child, the issue of paramount importance (in many cases) should cease to be that of parental “rights” and instead be a more strict construction of child’s best interest. While family reunification has evidently evolved, in theory, based on the theories that KellyM has so admirably articulated above, it has in practice gone too far in defending indefensible behaviors on the part of parents.
I have a question. Please forgive my ignorance, but how hard is putting a child up for adoption? I’ve always assumed it was a simple procedure. Can they reject a child?? Tell the mother she has to keep this one?
I mean, I believe abortion is an option and should always remain so. Adoption is a available(I think), as are orphanages(sp?). So as I see it(and check me if I’m wrong), you don’t have to go through with the pregnancy. If you choose to go through the pregnancy, you don’t have to raise the child. You can put the child up for adoption or surrender that child to the state.
Abandoning the child near a dumpster should get you 20 years in the pen.
I don’t think this would qualify as abandonment. Child Endangerment, sure, and we see a story like that in LA every summer. But the Police in your example would surely see that the parent intended to return for the child. This would be no different than leaving the child alone at home while the parent went to the store. It would warrant a visit from Social Services, but it’s not abandonment.
Spooje asked about adoption.
I am an adoptive parent myself. In South Korea, IIRC, there is a policy whereby parents (generally single mothers) can drop newborns off at police stations, and the infants’ legal status then changes to “abandoned” and the infants are then placed for adoption. I am told it is often the case that the mothers wait unobtrusively across the street or out of sight to be sure the infants will be taken care of.
Whether this would work in any sense in this country (the USA) I couldn’t say.
Both my kids are adopted from overseas. At least the birth mothers of my children gave enough of a damn to be sure that my children were placed in a good home.
I cannot estimate the mentality of someone who would abandon a child to die. The mix of rage, frustration, and disgust I experience when I think about people who are capable of such a thing disqualifies me from being able to contribute to a rational discussion of the pros and cons.
If I can say so without offense, I do not understand how it is comparable, even before the law, to leave an infant in the back of a car for ten minutes, or to abandon it beside a dumpster.
And my thoughts about someone who would throw a newborn to be eaten alive by dogs belong not here, but the Pit.
And how does the social services system suggest that a mother explain to her child later in life that at one point, she left him in an alley to die? How do they envision that conversation to be handled?
God have mercy on anyone who would do this to a child - I, unfortunately, have none.
Regards,
Shodan
Not that this justifies throwing your baby in a dumpter in any way, shape, or form, but adoption does require a certain degree of premeditation and deliberation that could be diffucult for someone who was in the throes of a deep emotional crisis. As horrible as it is, I can see how someone might not be able to stand the premeditation of planning to give a child up (talking about it before hand, intreviews with agencies, publically stating “I am giving up this baby”) but whom could reconcile having a fit and chucking a baby. (Once again, this dosen’t JUSTIFY anything, I am jsut musing on human nature). Many people, esp. teens, feel that there is something shameful about giving a baby up for adoption, and simply couldn’t bring themselves to do it deliberatly, but would do it spontaniously. Rather like people that get pregnant becasue carrying condems to a date means you are planning to have sex, which nice girls don’t do. Nice girls are swept away by thier emotions to the point where they are no longer responsible.
drpepper said:
I have a friend who has no family except for a sister I wouldn’t leave a dog with. She is childless, but were she to have a child her support network would be virtually non-existant. I odn’t think this makes her a bad person or would make her a bad parent. I don’t think she would have the sort of emotional breakdown where she needed tocall social services. But I think that if she did have a breakdown, and she did call social services, it would not mean she was a bad parent or that her parental rights should be terminated. I didn’t mean to say that parents who call social services and say “take my child” are always good parents. I just means it suggest that thier better parents than the ones where it is the neighbors that call social services. And I think it is appropriate that social services uses public resources to help out in cases like this–otherwise they are merely a cleanup crew and do nothing preventitive.
I should point out that I’m trained as a guardian ad litem and have served the court twice in this role. It’s easy to talk about how we should always do this or do that, but in real life child neglect cases are never simple and there simply are not hard and fast rules that can be applied.
I’ve already mentioned parent-child attachment, and others have alluded to the harm that severing that relationship can effect even when the relationship is troubled. There is a lot of evidence that even temporarily removing a child from his or her parent is a substantial harm to the child (especially if the child is between 6 months and 3 years of age); the state should be (but, unfortunately is not) required to meet a rather high burden before interfering in the parent-child bond. We haven’t discussed sibling attachment, which is another factor that has to be considered in removing children from the home (which can be legally difficult in the case of half-siblings, especially when the issue is a custody determination in divorce and the court has no jurisdiction over the half-sibling).
Also, on the issue of “parental rights”: the right to the parent-child relationship attaches not merely to the parent. This is a right belonging to the child as well. Severing the child’s right to have a relationship with his or her parent because of the parent’s wrongdoing unjustly punishes the child. (Of course, we do allow the parent to voluntarily terminate the relationship by putting the child up for adoption. There is clearly some tension here, but that’s not uncommon in the law.)
The “best interest of the child” is very rarely clear, even in abandonment cases and especially in cases when the parent has a mental illness. The current law favors reunification for two reasons: one, we now recognize that breaking the parent-child bond is virtually always harmful to the child, and two, we acknowledge a protected right of both the parent and the child to enjoy their relationship under the law and place a high burden on the state to disrupt it.
The truly sad thing is that in my experience, if a parent calls social services and asks for help, they won’t get it. In one of the cases where I was the guardian ad litem, we tried to get social services to assist either parent in caring for the children. Even after the judge in open court strongly suggested to the attorney for the county office that they should get involved they refused to commit to anything beyond an “evaluation” (which, as far as I know, was never done).
I second Manda Jo’s comments about the stigma some folks may experience about putting their child up for adoption. We’ve come full circle on that, it seems, when I was a teen, pregancies were hushed up, the girl went away for a while, came back non preggers. Now, I see kids at my son’s high school with their second baby at the football games, and hear how 'oh, I could never give up my baby".
As far as the baby/convenience store example, you may feel that it would never happen, however, don’t underestimate the power of the state. The supposition was that a law would be made making it a crime and automatic forfieture of parental rights if the child were abandoned in a dangerous circumstance.
My point was that if you made the phrasing specific, you’d end up having to ammend the law every time a new situation happened, but if you left the phrasing generalized (with the specific punishment in), then it could be made to apply in situations that it probably shouldn’t.
So, I personally have no problem seeing some event where a parent left their child alone for a moment, intending to return, and would be subject to prosecution under a draconian law such as was being talked about.
I agree with the OP that leaving babies in dumpsters is wrong. It’s a waste of good compost.
J.E.T.
If I read your post correctly your point is that abandoning a baby is a hard decision for the mother no matter what the circumstances.
With this I agree
However there are far more effective ways to get rid of a child without subjecting them to the kind of environmental hazards in the OP.
I have a little sister who had a child at 14, it was decided that the child be put up for adoption. Kid was placed in a couple of days.
One of the favorites from my EMT days, hospital emergency departments. Moms come in with baby, give some BS info to get them into a examining room, and quietly wander away or claim to be going to restroom and never come back.
Neither of these are great leaps of deductive logic for even the most “intellectually challenged” parent.
There is no excuse for leaving your child in an evironment where it will die if not found in a matter of hours.
We as parents are responsible for our childrens well being period we don’t get to say “I was stressed out so I left my baby in a dumpster.” Somebody else finds baby and now its what, “oops, I didn’t mean any harm?”
Melpomene said:
C’mon now…millions, unwanted, daily? Cite?
Spooje quoted:
-then responded:
No difference? I gotta respectfully disagree. To me, leaving your sleeping infant locked in a car for a moment, a few feet away, maybe even in view, is pretty low risk.
But leaving your child (possibly) miles away, where even if you had some magical way of knowing something was wrong, you would be powerless to do anything about it, is extremely (and IMO inexcusably) risky.
There’re a lot of similar comparisons in this thread, between the placement of a baby where there is little chance it will be found (obviously bad), and placing it where there is a good chance it will be found (somehow, not as bad? what?). I get the distinction, but it’s not one that I’d care to defend in court, much less on Judgment Day.
I feel that when the stakes are elevated to this level (a human life), the significance of the difference is drastically diminished.
You’re still talking about a chance. If there is a chance (good, poor, whatever) that the baby will be found, there is also undeniably a chance that it won’t.
I can’t comprehend how someone can do anything less than to physically hand the infant directly to another human being, or how any degree (and I’m not talking about the infant in the car at the convenience store here) of abandonment can be acceptable/justifiable.
Aw Dammit, Shodan already said it better than me anyway.
From what I have read about these cases, (and I have no cites) I gather that the vast majority of newborn abandonments (Is that a word?) are by teen mothers who have hidden the pregnancy from family members.
While I agree with the point made about adoption, It appears that most of these young mothers never considered it a viable option. Apparently they hid the pregnancy in the first place to avoid dealing with parents or the system, and thought they could just “throw away the problem”.
Ok next example, me and my partner pull into fresno community hospital ER, unload our patient, come back out.
A car parked on the side of the street with a baby in a carseat windows rolled up. No parent in sight, we are the only “adults” in immediate view. Car was there when we pulled in.
Its 102 degrees at 2pm on this lovely summer day. Kid is bright red amd screaming like the world is ending, maybe its because mommy left him for 5 minutes, or maybe its because its an inferno inside the dark blue camaro. We try the doors, locked, we debate for a few minutes. Figuring the kid had been in there for at least 20 min or so as the car was painfully hot to the touch from sitting in the sun.
So we decided to give him a lil air, via the butt end of a Mag Light applied to the driver side window. Opened door, removed kid and took him inside into the air conditioning. We told the triage nurse who called hospital security. Mom showed up 25 minutes later. Of course by the time she showed, CPS has been called in by hospital security, needless to say they were not amused. She then starts screaming about she was only away from the car for 3 minutes and that she wants us arrested for breaking into her car and kidnapping her baby. PD arrived listened to everyones story and, she was arrested. No charges against me or my partner were ever filed.
A couple minutes? ok maybe if the car/kid are still in sight. Going into somewhere and knowingly leaving a kid in an environment that could hurt them is so wrong on so many levels. Even for a few minutes.
Absolutely agreed. As you pointed out there are lots of variables that can change the scenario drastically.
In direct sun, on a 102°F day, a sealed up car with a dark interior can produce brain-boiling temperatures in just a couple minutes.
I will break someone’s window to rescue a pet. Please don’t anyone assume that I would leave an infant in a car like that.
She is lucky there was a live baby to come back to.
Sorry all, I suppose we are straying a bit from the OP here.
Kelly, MandaJo: there is a law either being proposed or that actually
passed in Colorado saying (essentially) that if you “abandon” your
kid at a certain number of safe locations (fire houses, hospitals,
police stations, etc) you cannot be charged with any criminal action
from that and that, with councelling you will generally be allowed to
get your child back.
There is a similar law in Texas. Recently, a woman came into a local hospital and quickly gave birth to a baby. the woman disappeared after leaving a note relinquishing any rights to the child and asked theat the child be caredfor because she was unable to do so.
The newspapers letters to the editor page quickly produced a letter calling the woman a coward for her actions. What? The dumpster choice is better? or abortion? Maybe the letter writer was unhappy because neither the woman or the baby would be taken out to the public square and stoned. The Taliban method of birth control.
hedgehog
I just finished reading a book that’s all about the “crisis” of females born in China. I’m at work right now, but if I can’t find the proper references via the Net, I will happily bring the book in with me tomorrow. 
Yes, the number may not be “millions” as my oh-so-dramatic-self previously stated. I will gladly eat those words with salt & vinegar. However, I do know the number is very very high and that the issue of what to do with those fmeale newborns is a big one. It’s an issue that is dealt with in many ways, the ones I mentioned above. That’s how I felt it was relevant to the discussion.
Still, I will track down some numbers for you.