We’re seeing this from multiple directions now, including former Nebraska State Senator Chip Maxwell (R) who has moved on into his next career of sorts at the Nebraska Coalition for Ethical Research lobbying against embryonic stem cell research. (Also see “You can be Pro Holiness and LOVE Stem Cell Research” here.) Yesterday he blogged about the Nebraska legalized child abandonment disaster, Safe Haven: We meant to do that.
He offers up legislators “meant to do that,” claiming they:
wanted the spectacle of teenagers being dropped off at hospitals under the safe haven law to highlight the difficulties families have in getting help for troubled teens
Let’s be clear here, genuine longtime opponents of the dump laws didn’t want anything to pass. We did not want any version of it going forward. We have opposed dump laws across the board. We tried to talk some sense into Nebraska legislators before they passed the “Aged up” version, as the law went into effect, and later after the dumps began. This aged up version was their creation not ours.
Nebraska’s unique dump law was not created due to any encouragement from us. This is a mess of their own making.
We oppose all dump bills, and have consistently called for their full repeal after their passage. See my comment the day after the went into effect and my first post on the Nebraska situation, in which I started off with:
It’s long past time for Nebraska to repeal the worst baby dump law in the country.
Some of us ourselves are adoptees. We know what abandonment can do to kids, younger, or older. We know what not having information about one’s origins means, in ways people with that information cannot fathom. We know what feelings of loss and be left or perhaps even unwanted do to kids over the course of a lifetime, we see such in the adoptee community all the time. It is precisely due to that understanding, and that empathy that we oppose all dump laws.
Never in a million years would I advise real kids actually have to go through the act of legalized abandonment just to make a point. It’s not ethical to play with kids lives that way.
I have a deep empathy with the kids and what they will endure. (Now some are already enduring.)
These 21 kids (see how I reached that number in my posts concerning gaming the numbers and the numbers spin,) and there may well be more by the time Nebraska legislators finally get around to putting an end to older dumps, are going to be dealing with the consequences of Nebraska’s failed experiment in child welfare law for the rest of their lives.
Under the aged down version, just like the rest of the country, a whole new class of kids abandoned at the state’s encouragement are going to be dealing with that for the rest of their lives. Estimates already run between 1,000 and 2,000 kids have been dumped nationwide under these hideous laws.
Do not for one instant attempt to hang these dumps around the necks of the very people who have fought these bills from the beginning.
Now as for Nebraska state legislators and their motivations regarding what they passed?
I honestly don’t know what the hell they were thinking.
But this was a legalized abandonment bill.
They wanted a dump bill, they passed a dump bill, and legalized abandonment advocates, far from instantly understanding the damage that the NE law was about to cause, instead crowed about getting their 50th state, claiming Nebraska as a victory.
If anyone is to blame for this mess, and the mess in the other 50 states, it’s dump law advocates, who in their short sighted race to pass these abominations, have created a lasting legacy of a legal mess and personal scars these kids are now stuck with.
As I said before:
Someone get these kids a lawyer, they’ve got one hell of a case.
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