‘Safe haven’ laws for abandoning infants have their roots in Houston 20 years ago
It was after dark Monday when a man came to Houston Fire Station 76 holding a 9month-old baby. He handed the little boy over to firefighters and walked away, leaving his child in the care of strangers.
Within half an hour, the story was all over the news. A baby was dropped off “without any notice,” the Houston Fire Department tweeted. TV stations captured video of a police officer tenderly holding the child.
Monday’s story had a quick resolution: The child’s grandmother, who has custody, came to claim the boy in time for the 10 p.m. news broadcasts.
But when babies are abandoned at fire stations across the country, the families usually don’t return — and the laws that govern those cases have roots in Houston.
Fire stations — along with hospitals and emergency medical centers — are designated “safe havens,” where parents are legally allowed to leave their infants without fear of prosecution. It’s a system designed to give an option to overwhelmed parents who know they can’t care for an infant: Instead of abandoning their child in a field, a bathroom stall or a trash bin, they can leave the baby in a safe place and walk away — no questions asked.
Every state has a law that allows this, but the first was passed in Texas nearly 20 years ago.
For a 10-month stretch in the late 1990s, 13 babies were abandoned in Harris County. One was left on the street; one was at a Holiday Inn; one was in a
trash can. Three of them were dead by the time someone found them.
The numbers were unprecedented, said Estella Olguin, community relations director for Harris County Protective Services. “That’s when legislators were like, ‘We’ve go to do something.’”
‘Safer for a parent’
So Texas lawmakers came up with the Baby Moses law. (It is named for the biblical infant in Exodus 2 whose mother put him in a basket and cast him in shallow water to save his life. The baby was then rescued and adopted by the pharaoh’s daughter who named him Moses.) A parent can turn over a baby at one of these “safe havens,” but the child must be 60 days old or younger and unharmed — and the baby must be handed directly to an employee, not simply left on a doorstep. Other states followed suit, adopting similar laws, with time frames ranging from one to 90 days.
“The anonymity of it makes it safer for a parent,” said Tejal Patel, spokeswoman for the Department of Family and Protective Services in Houston. “You’re not going to get prosecuted. You’re not going to be arrested.”
Instead, she said, the parents’ rights are voluntarily terminated, so the baby gets a medical examination and then goes into the foster care system.
In the Greater Houston region, 20 “Baby Moses” infants have been left at havens just since 2014, according to the Department of Family and Protective Services. That doesn’t include the children who didn’t qualify under Texas law. Monday night’s situation, for instance, was not a “Baby Moses” case because the child was 9 months old.
Other resources available
If an older child is left behind, authorities have to seek out the parents, Patel said. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be prosecuted for abandonment or neglect.
“A lot of times, depending on the situation and the age, it’ll be seen as a misunderstanding of the law,” she said.
The concept of a baby left at a fire station even pops up frequently in pop culture. For example, it’s a key plot point in the NBC drama “This Is Us” and in Celeste Ng’s 2017 bestselling novel, “Little Fires Everywhere.” But the Baby Moses law hasn’t eliminated the discarding of newborn children. In 2013, Houstonians followed the story of Baby Chloe, who was found in a plastic bag near a Cypress apartment complex with her umbilical cord still attached. She was placed with a foster family who later adopted her — but not before people from across the globe, from Alaska to Afghanistan, inquired about adopting her.
Often, Olguin said, overwhelmed parents simply don’t know about the resources available to them. To help, the Department of Family and Protective Services set up a Baby Moses hotline at 1-877-904-7283 to offer help and advice.
“We’ve had cases where someone calls and says, ‘I’m pregnant and I don’t want my baby. What can I do? Where’s the nearest fire station I can take him to?’” Olguin said. “We provide that, but we also say, ‘Here are some child placing agencies. You can give the baby up for adoption. Some people don’t even know that’s an option.”