We have all these Public Service Announcements about how you need to eat vegetables when you're pregnant and how you'll be skinny if you breastfeed.

Just think how much good one about Save Haven laws could do.

You can only imagine the sad backstory behind this. Thankfully the baby is alive and healthy.

How many more are nto found, ever.  This happens everyday here and everywhere else.  So many people just dont value a human life other than their own.

If we continue to say that a minutely developing fetus has THE SAME  human value and worth as an actual live newborn baby, then young (or old) mothers will feel no less guilt and discomfort about tossing their brand new 'out of the uterus baby' aside, than aborting the 'in utero baby'. Better to carry the pregnancy through and abandon the baby, than to abort, and risk ultimate judgment.  Twisted, I know. But, fundamentalist  pro-lifers are continually comparing  globs of developing  embryonic cells, to that of  real live actual babies, and I think there is a connection here between that thinking, and this kind of story-at least in some cases.  Who know what happened here.

Makes me sick people leaving their little babies out on the side of the road, so  glad someone saw him/her. Wish they would have just left it on a doorstep, of at a hospital or something. Poor little baby.

It is so easy to feel angry at birthmothers who don’t take advantage of the Safe Haven laws – I know, because my own birth mother was one of those women.  

But I can also imagine what it’s like to be someone, maybe, who’s grown up with a serious mistrust of the law and public institutions, and who’s been burned one too many times by programs that promise to help but seem to punish – trusting a teacher or a social worker with a private concern, for example, only to have your secret exposed and often, disregarded (like a young woman who told a teacher of sexual and physical abuse by her father.  Clearly, the teacher had a duty to report it.  But she reported it to the father, the child was questioned in front of her parents, who of course denied it.  She never got help – and continued to be abused for another 7 years until she ran away).  With experiences like that, I wouldn’t blame a woman who knew about Safe Haven for not believing that she wouldn’t be caught and her pregnancy and childbirth exposed – maybe to parents or others she was trying to hide it from – even though we all know that’s not what would happen. Fear is a powerful motivator.  There is such shame put out on women who get pregnant in some situations, such abuse and violence and hatred that I’d bet most of the readers here have been lucky enough not to experience.  I can’t condemn these women without knowing the circumstances of their lives.

Don’t get me wrong – Safe Haven is a wonderful program, and I do wish that more education about it and more publicity could be had and I believe it will help.  But we also need to work on the parents who treat young women hatefully for getting pregnant (when they wouldn’t treat a son that way for having sex, if they even knew about it), on the boyfriends or husbands who beat women senseless for the same thing, of the women who are punished and harassed and terrified because of their bodies, their sexual lives, and their ability to bear children.  That, I think, is the reason women leave babies in this way – they are trying to escape at the very least the shame and emotional scarring, if not physical abuse and risk of death.  That problem needs to be solved – and only then can Safe Haven really work the way we all want it to.

I firmly believe that these women are women for whom we must have compassion, rather than criticism.

I think that if we had more information out there about Safe Haven, then there would be more trust in the system and more mothers would take advantage of it, rather than essentially commit murder of their new child.

Compassion is one thing - but when you hear a story like this, it is hard to feel anything but anger and disgust.