The Question of the Baby Box

I was reading an article about a Florida proposal to install anonymous baby drop boxes in fire stations.

The drop box is essentially a slot on the outside wall of the building with no camera watching so that mothers in desperation can surrender their babies: “instead of dumping them in trash cans or along roadsides,” as the author, Terry Spencer, puts it. It’s a modern version of the foundling wheel. It is already legal in Florida to surrender your baby at a hospital or fire station within seven days of giving birth with no questions asked; there are similar laws in all fifty states.  The dropbox just adds an extra layer of anonymity. No one has to see the face of the person surrendering the baby. You slide the baby through the slot into a temperature-controlled bassinet, and the door automatically locks behind them. A hospital worker or firefighter will go and get the baby within two minutes. The baby will then be put up for adoption.

As for Mom, “a bag containing instructions and maternal medical advice pops out,” and she’s on her way. The surrogate mothers in the televised version of The Handmaid’s Tale got ice cream as a reward for having a baby, but birth mothers in Florida just get medical advice.

The thought of all this is making me queasy.

In the United States, we do not have guaranteed affordable healthcare for pregnant women and newborns. And even if you’ve got the money to pay for it, the care is not the best, especially in Florida where the drop boxes are being proposed. 

In the United States, only 32 of the 50 states terminate the parental rights of rapists for a baby conceived in rape. A total stranger who forced himself on you could demand to co-parent and a judge might force you to comply.

In the United States, forty-three states allow marriage for minors in some fashion, and seven states have no minimum marriage age at all as long as a parent signs off.

Among industrialized countries, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate. However, the number one killer of pregnant women in the United States isn’t an obstetric illness, but homicide— a combination of intimate partner violence and the ready availability of guns. And once the baby is born, the United States has an astonishingly high rate of child hunger as well.

And someone’s solution to this is anonymous baby drop boxes.

I can’t even begin to imagine the trauma a birth mother faces– even if she’s made the best possible choice, even if the adoptive parents are wonderful. I know some fantastic adoptive parents, but there’s always trauma involved. I can’t imagine blithely ignoring the trauma of a mom in difficult straits and expecting her to dump the baby in a box.

What happens if a mother in dire straits squeezes out the baby unassisted, stuffs them in a box and then dies of childbirth complications somewhere else?

What happens if the embarrassed parents of a pregnant teen decide to punish her by forcing her to give birth unassisted, and then stealing the baby and putting them in the box to protect their reputation? What if an angry paranoid abusive spouse wants to hurt his wife when she’s recovering from childbirth and there’s a baby box nearby? What if a psychotic babysitter or neighbor decides the mother is unfit and kidnaps the baby? These are just a few of the scenarios where having a convenient way to dump an infant could create a disaster.

In the richest country in the world, we have created such a terrible dystopia that anonymous drop boxes for human beings are being proposed as a solution.

It’s so overwhelming, I don’t know what more I can say.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.