Do you have any opposition to this type of legislation? If so, why?
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http://www.babymoses.org/faq.htm#9SAVING ABANDONED NEWBORNS:
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE BABY MOSES PROJECT
The Baby Moses Project is a non-profit organization whose purpose is two fold: first, to save the lives of newborn infants, and second, to provide protection from prosecution for those mothers who choose a responsible alternative to abandonment. To accomplish this, the public must be informed of the passage of Safe Haven Legislation. This bill permits a mother to voluntarily relinquish the custody of her infant to an emergency medical service provider, who in turn, will give the child to the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services for adoptive placement. In addition to being given anonymity, the mother will also be provided with an affirmative defense to abandonment prosecution.
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http://library.adoption.com/Laws-Legal-Issues/The-Wall-Street-Journals... After 38 years with The Wall Street Journal and despite serving as Executive Washington editor for that paper, not to mention his prominence as a regular on CNN's "The Capital Gang," it is to be expected that Al Hunt will strike out once in a while strictly on the basis of not reporting the facts. (There's no point in trying to assess Hunt's score on ideology, given the fact that he's the resident "liberal" of a paper with a consistently "conservative" philosophy.)
Sadly, Hunt goofed in an area - children's issues and adoption - where he's got a deep and abiding personal interest, he's an adoptive parent and is supportive of adoption. Hunt has often hit homers. Most notably, Hunt was on former President Clinton's back about having a Department of Health and Human Services that tolerated race-based placement policies for children receiving federal funds. And Hunt was supportive of foster care reforms undertaken by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hunt's folly came in an Aug. 21, 2003, "Politics & People" column in The Wall Street Journal entitled "No Safe Haven." "Safe Haven" refers to those laws, sometimes also called "Baby Moses" laws which allow women, or someone they give their babies to, to have an option other than unsafely abandoning their newborns - or killing them. The essence of the laws is that women can anonymously put their children in the arms of someone at a Safe Haven, or leave their babies at a Safe Haven site - usually a hospital or fire station - without fear of being prosecuted for child abandonment. The first such bill, in Texas, was signed into law on June 3, 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush. Since then, 44 other states have passed various versions of the Texas law.
Maybe Hunt's problem has something to do with the fact that President Bush and Texas Republican Geanie Morrison, a GOP State Representative from Victoria, were godparents of the movement to pass these laws. Whatever the reasons, Hunt decided to write a column Aug. 21 about a "pocket veto" of a law nearly unanimously passed by the Hawaii legislature months ago. What prompted Hunt to drag this dead bill out and prop it up is unknown. There's certainly little debate at present in any of the remaining state legislatures about such bills.
*SNIP*
Hay's counterpart at the state level in Austin, Geoff Wool, Director of Public Information for TDPRS, says his Department does not attempt to collect data on or report on Baby Moses relinquishments. What is available are data for all babies that fall within the age range of the Baby Moses law, including babies presumably like those saved in Houston in 2002, and who are found alive. And those numbers do not show the law to be a "failure" unless declining abandonments is equated with "failure." Abandonments, even after Rep. Morrison expanded the law in 2001 to babies 31-60 days of age, went down every year. In 2000, the first full year after the law passed, there were 54 live babies abandoned in Texas. In 2001, with an expanded pool of babies, it was 43 babies. In 2002, it was 38 babies. A near one-third drop in abandonments from 2000 to 2002 hardly seems like a failure.
*SNIP*