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"Even one baby's life..."
by Lesli LaRocco * fla@lightlink.org
"If it will save even one baby's life, it will be worth it," said one of the birthmothers at a joint adoptee/birthmother meeting.
We were discussing "baby dump" laws, those weirdly primitive, yet bleakly futuristic laws that allow a woman (the mother, one assumes) to leave her baby anonymously on the modern version of the church steps. Depending on the law, the church steps in question may be a fire station or a hospital or other site, and depending on the law, the baby can be up to 72 hours or a month old. The details hardly matter. Each law wants to stop women killing their newborns and leaving them in bathrooms, the woods, dumpsters, or on the shelves of the local grocery store. The message they send is that if you want to get rid of your baby and be anonymous about it, these laws will give you an alternative to neonaticide.
The laws remind me of another discussion, years before these laws came about. A woman who has no connection to adoption, hearing about a case of neonaticide, asked why these women don’t “just” adopt out the child. I suggested that a woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy doesn’t muse over whether to abort, and if not, whether to raise the child, adopt it out, or put it in a dumpster. The last choice is never a rational choice; the others can be.
And this is what bothers me about these laws. My instincts told me that a woman who commits neonaticide is not the same woman who plans an adoption or looks for a way to raise her baby. This may seem obvious to those connected to adoption, but apparently, the public and politicians alike overlook the point. And a search of the literature supports my instincts: in “Neonaticide in the city of Rio de Janeiro: forensic and psycholegal perspectives” (Journal of Forensic Science 1999 Jul;44(4):741-5), the authors conclude that most women who commit neonaticide “…usually kept the pregnancy a secret (94.1%)” and “…a higher incidence of reported psychiatric symptoms.”
Similarly, in “Psychotic denial of pregnancy” (Hospital and Community Psychiatry 1990 Nov;41(11):1233-7), L.J. Miller summarizes, “Psychotic denial of pregnancy in chronic mentally ill women may place the women and their fetuses at high risk of postpartum emotional disturbance, precipitous or unassisted delivery, fetal abuse, and neonaticide.”
Even a cursory search of the literature emphasizes that women who commit neonaticide often deny their pregnancies and have a history of psychiatric problems. Simply offering a woman a place to drop off the baby—whose very existence she may have been denying—is not a solution. A person irrational enough to kill a newborn is not going to seek out a more humane way of expressing her psychological problems.
I have no doubt that these anonymous drop-offs will be used. In some cases, women suffering from postpartum depression who have little or no support may use them. Unscrupulous baby brokers may eventually find a way to use them to procure “clean slate” babies. I do not, however, think that a woman in the throes of a psychotic episode will take advantage of this social service.
These laws may support the idea that a woman who plans an adoption is little different from one who murders her newborn, and they may help the unscrupulous procure more infants. But I don’t for a minute think they will save a single baby.
Lesli
LaRocco, a Late-Discovery Adpoptee, ********************** (This feature appeared in the Winter 2001 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.) Copyright 2001 Bastard Nation
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