NEBRASKA SAFE HAVEN LAW: TIRED OF YOUR KID?

You'll all be glad to know that Nebraska's "Baby" Safe Haven law goes into effect today. Note the quotation marks. They're important.

Unlike every other state that puts an age limit on dumping (3 days, 7 days, 1 month) the Nebraska legislature gives desperate killer parents a break. Nebraskans can dump their resident juvenile-of- any-age, as long as it's done in a politically correct manner --at a hospital. Unfortunately turning Biff and Buffy over to the cops will still get Mom and Dad a stay in the GrayBar Hotel.

This isn't new news. I wrote about Nebraska's odd safe haven take previously in Nebraska's New Baby Dump Law: Better than Ritilan. You can read the poorly written law here.

Read the KETV-Omaha report to get the full absurdity and ramifications:

The new law that takes effect Friday says that any individual can leave a minor with a hospital employee without fear of being charged with abandonment."Then it becomes a nurturing, supportive, helpful atmosphere versus criminal neglect or abuse-type atmosphere," Chambers said. (Deb Chambers is , the director of the Family Birth Center.)...

...The new law says anyone under the age of 19 can be dropped at a hospital. Hospital staff said they already have procedures in place to help children and the elderly, so they will keep using those to help any older children.

The child advocacy group Voices of Children, isn't impressed:

We hope the intent of the law, which is to be in the best interest of children, is followed, but we're not sure whether or not this is the best-designed policy to do that," Voices for Children policy coordinator Sarah Ann Lewis said. "We'd rather see mothers use the services already in the community, like adoption or counseling, instead of abandonment."

Actually on closer look, this isn't a "Baby Safe Haven" law at all. It's decriminalization of child abandonment dressed up in fashionable safe haven bombastia. It simply takes away the ability of prosecutors to prosecute abandonment as long as the left behind isn't abused. This, of course, is an option prosecutors have always had and used frequently until the baby dump set twisted prosecutorial discretion into anonymous baby dumping.

It would have been a simple matter for states to decriminalize "abandonment." Of course, it would have been perceived by the public as social decay and being soft on crime. Instead, safe haven advocates, reactionary adoption industry thugs pushing back adoptee rights, natural dads, and ICWA, along with a variety of bleeding heart do-gooders and media hounds, with agendas very different from decriminalization, pimped anonymous baby dumping as a way to "save babies," So far, they've been unable show us one baby actually "saved" from the dumpster. All we see is non-documented kids fast tracked into the adoption mill and potential child killers bribed off the hook.

It's 1:30 AM and I'm writing this on my porch . Down the street my obnoxious teenage neighbor is screaming at her boyfriend. She does this a lot. Sometimes, and I'm not making this up, she jumps up and down on the hood of his car--just in case he misses her point. Once I get this blog up I'm going to walk down there and offer her a free road trip to Omaha. She'll thank me for it some day. I mean, what's the alernative?


July 18, 7:05 PM ADDENDA: Phew! After I posted this entry I started to worry that maybe the hospital wouldn't accept my teenage neighbor into the Nebraska Safe Haven Program. After all, I'm not her mother. Thankfully, KOLN/KGIN (Grand Island) clarified this today:

The statute also states that a person only have "physical custody" of the child they're handing over, not "legal custody," so you don't have to be the child's parent or guardian.

NEBRASKA HERE WE COME!