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 had already received social service assistance, and that Staton may have been suffering, as some have suggested, from depression.

Both Staton and his wife had trouble holding down jobs, according to the NYT story. Giving birth so frequently seems the obvious reason behind why Staton's late wife couldn't keep a steady job, but we don't know why Staton could not stay employed or why he quit his factory job prior to "dumping" his children.

A comment at the end of the StrollerDerby post declared Staton should be "the poster dad for reproductive choice."

His story is sad, and at WOWT TV you can watch an interview with the children's maternal grandparents and Staton's daughter Amoria Micek, the child he did not abandon because she was 18.

Amoria still keeps in touch with her dad. "I wouldn't call it tough, outsiders might call it tough. I speak to him almost on a daily basis and it's not really anything major, just make sure he's doing okay and everything's working out." (WOWT)

I learned of Micek's interview through a blog at The Washington Post in which Stacey Garfinkle asks "Does Safe Haven Law Help or Hurt?" and gives the following information:

The National Safe Haven Alliance reports uncertainty about the exact number of children abandoned under the laws, but estimates the number at more than 2,000, according to the New York Times. In 2003, a report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, cautioned that safe haven laws were causing more problems by encouraging women to conceal pregnancies and abandon babies rather than receive counseling and by undermining child welfare practices. (WP)

It's possible that Baby Love Child would agree with that assessment. She's been following the Nebraska story and believes the abandonment cases bolster her anti-safe-haven laws position. I gather that she's concerned about the emotional harm abandoned children will suffer, and stating her case, she shares the story of a 14-year-old pregnant teen abandoned in Nebraska. You can watch the teen's interview at Nebraska's Action 3 News.

Baby Love Child explains her views on Nebraska's safe haven law this way:

Nebraska legislators should be ashamed. ... Speaking as an adoptee coming from a sealed records state, I have no way of knowing whether I was abandoned or spent time in foster care of not, but what I do know is that kids, particularly minors are going to internalize this and live with the Nebraska’s legislators’ social experimentation for the rest of their lives. (Baby Love child)

In the case of the pregnant 14-year-old, the girl's mother decided she wanted her teen back and is receiving help from her church and others.

One commenter on The Washington Post parenting blog would probably feel that a result like the one in the pregnant teen's case is exactly why safe haven laws work, and the commenter uses the willingness of Gary Staton's family to help as evidence for that belief:

The Stanton situation is being used by some people as an argument against the Safe Haven law in its present form. It is actually quite the opposite. For whatever reason, Mr. Stanton was unwilling to ask for
help from relatives. Yet after he left his children, some of those
relatives have come forward with offers to take in the children. Mr.
Stanton's action was a cry for help - and the help will be provided for his children. The immediate situation is very painful for both Mr. Stanton and his children. Yet we can hope that the eventual resolution will be a good one. This is precisely the intent of the Safe Haven law- to take someone's private crisis and bring it out into the open - so that, in the end, the children will be given protection. It would be a mistake to impose age limits on the law. Parents with children of any age might become overwhelmed by circumstances and not see any way out. The Safe Haven law is a clear sign to any such parents that no matter what, there is someone who will take care of their children. (LeszX comment at WP)

Another commenter at WP, WorkingMom X seemed to say that the solution is not
safe haven laws or even special programs but birth control.

Re the Stantons, while my heart breaks for him and his situation, I think it is beyond irresponsible to have a family that large unless you have a sizeable, independent income and can raise them without public assistance. I suppose I would argue for free birth control as a kind of public assistance available to anyone. (WorkingMom X)

Blogger Bastardette is also following the Nebraska cases. She's absolutely against safe haven laws in any form or what she calls "baby dumping" laws. She interviewed National Council for Adoption President Tom Atwood who agrees with safe haven laws for the parents of infants, but not for the parents of older children.

Atwood said, according to both Bastardette and NPR, that there is already a system in place for the parents of older children to either get help with parenting or to relinquish their parental rights by a more formal legal route. The current Nebraska line bypasses that system, he thinks.

The law was written to protect even older children who are at risk or neglect and abuse. The NYT article and other reports indicate officials, such as Todd A. Landry, Nebraska's state director of children and family services, do not think the recently abandoned older children were in any danger, that the parents abused the safe haven law and did not take advantage of other avenues and public resources to assist overwhelmed parents.

Nebraska State Sen. Tom White, who believes the law should allow parents to drop children at safe havens up to age 14, thinks an abandoned child is the danger signal. He said in a September 19 NPR interview that if parents are "so crazed that they will take a child to a hospital and tell them to get out, ask yourself how far are they away from hurting a child?"

NPR has another story on Nebraska's abandoned teens at this link.

Baby Love Child reports that the total number of abandoned children in Nebraska since July is up to 18.

Photo credit: WOWT TV, Amoria Micek, 18-year-old daughter of Gary Staton, and her maternal grandparents.

Nordette is a Contributing Editor to BlogHer.com, and you may read her personal blog post on another site at WSATA.