Safe Havens for Abandoned Infants

What to do with a newborn whose very existence presents a crisis? That question has troubled humans for as long as they have been fruitful and multiplying. It’s one that is particularly close to my heart: My fifth daughter is adopted. She was found abandoned on a wintry sidewalk soon after birth, her umbilical cord still attached, and survived the exposure by a series of miracles. Now, she is a happy teenager in a large, loving family.

Baby hatches, installed at fire stations, hospitals, and other safe locations, present an answer. Just two days ago, a newborn was surrendered at a Safe Haven Baby Box in Woodburn, Indiana, where the nonprofit was founded. There are currently 142 Safe Haven boxes across the country. Mothers can remain anonymous, and the boxes are temperature-controlled to ensure the comfort of the infant. A silent alarm is triggered when a baby is placed inside the box. 

The hatches are an update of a long-existing concept. Ancient “foundling wheels” were built into the walls of medieval convents, monasteries, and churches throughout Europe. These wheels had a bell, which was rung after the bundled newborn was placed in the receptacle and the wheel had been turned. The infant would travel from the cold and inhospitable outdoors to the warm interior of a religious house in seconds, to be collected by the sleepy nun awoken by the bell. The surrender was anonymous, sparing the baby’s family from the shame of being driven to this extremity by poverty, illegitimacy, or some other calamity. The child would later be baptized and given a last name like “Esposito,” which means “exposed” or “abandoned.” Sometimes the child’s own mother would offer herself as a wet nurse, and thus preserve the happiness of nursing her baby even if she was too poor to raise the child. 

It was Pope Innocent III who, in 1198, decreed that all churches in Italy should install a foundling wheel to receive endangered infants while protecting the anonymity of the parents. That was a time of great famine, and each morning the banks of the Tiber were found littered with tiny corpses. He reacted to this humanitarian crisis with the Christian spirit of radical inclusiveness, which had so shocked the pagan world a thousand years before, taking the words of Jesus to heart: “Whoever receives and welcomes one child such as this in my name receives me.”

To the wider culture of that time, it was a nonsensical attitude, as newborns, like slaves or foreigners, had no intrinsic value or legal standing. Each baby was evaluated for his or her utility or necessity to the family—those found wanting (especially those deemed defective) were directly killed or, in what was thought a more humane solution, exposed to the elements. Aristotle believed that no deformed or disabled baby should be allowed to live and burden the community. And ancient Romans could (and did) legally dispose of their unwanted babies by drowning them, throwing them in the trash, exposing them to the elements, or selling them to slave traffickers. Early Christians fought a hard culture war against the custom, trying to drum the intrinsic worth of unwanted children into people long accustomed to disposing of them without stigma. Finally, in A.D. 374, Bishop Basil of Caesarea convinced Emperor Valentinian to make infanticide (and infanticide through exposure) illegal.   

The famine-stricken medieval Christians, unlike the earlier pagans, had no doubt that laying a newborn on the cold ground to die from exposure or casting him or her into the Tiber to drown were dreadful sins. Hunger drove them to it. Today, our moral state is a lot closer to that of the pre-Christian world. Abortion is used to eliminate most disabled children long before they take their first breath, as well as millions of healthy but unwanted babies. In Tim Walz’s Minnesota, newborns that are born alive in a botched abortion are legally exposed—not on a trash heap but on a cold metal table, perhaps with a cloth thrown over their little faces to spare the abortion workers in the room from having to see the infants’ grimaces.

The newborn surrendered in the Indiana Safe Haven box is likely a fortunate escapee from our abortion culture. The infant’s abandonment was, no doubt, driven by unfortunate circumstances, whether dysfunction, despair, the threat of violence, the tragedy of addiction—who knows? What we can be certain of, though, is that the child’s safe surrender, like my daughter’s unlikely survival, is a victory over the darkness that resides in every human heart, in every age.

Grazie Pozo Christie is a senior fellow for The Catholic Association. 

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Image by Gustave Moreau, provided by Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.