It seemed like a good idea

Once upon a time, the state of Nebraska enacted a Safe Haven law permitting parents- without fear of prosecution- to drop children off at approved hospitals throughout the state. As is frequently the case with such laws, its initial intent was beneficial: to curb and hopefully eliminate newborn abandonments. Every state in the U.S. has a safe haven law of some kind on the books.

Nebraska’s law contained one minor difference. It used the word “child” instead of “newborn” or “infant”. Apparently, a few senators were concerned about arbitrary age limits and felt that “child” was a more acceptable word.

The substitution would make all the difference in the world, because when theory was put into practice, consequences that hadn’t been fully anticipated arose. Parents from other states who’d had it up to here their troublesome teenagers decided to take a road trip to Nebraska. One Nebraska parent took her 14-year old to a police station.

The child was refused. Police stations were not on the state-approved drop off list.

One of the most shocking- and sad- cases involved a father who decided to surrender 9 of his 10 children (whose ages ranged from 20 months to 17 years) to a hospital in Omaha. When asked how he could do such a thing, the man said that he could no longer cope. He was unemployed, overwhelmed, and his wife of 17 years had died of a brain aneurysm shortly after delivering their youngest child.

The stories piled up. Saturday Night Live ran a skit. Scrutiny of Nebraska’s new law intensified. All told, 34 children were abandoned before the Nebraska legislature would propose a rewrite. A law that had once been a vanguard acquired a distinction of a different kind- it now imposed one of the strictest age limits in the land. Under the new revision, infants no older than 3 days of age could be left at a drop-off point.

A few news items have caused me to reevaluate Nebraska’s initial law and to contemplate whether those senators knew something the rest of us didn’t.

There is, of course, the story of Josef Fritzl. You may recall Fritzl as the (now) 73-year old man who decided it would be neat to abduct his 18-year-old daughter and keep her in the basement of his house for 24 years, repeatedly raping and impregnating the poor girl. She bore 7 children.

A safe haven law probably wouldn’t have made much difference; Fritzl lived in Austria, after all. Moreover, he certainly did not want to give up his daughter.

But such bizarre stories don’t just happen in Europe. Last week in Florida, a 16-year old boy recently escaped from a bathroom he’d been confined to for nearly three years by his adoptive mother and her boyfriend. The boy, who weighed a mere 111 pounds when the authorities showed up, had endured a lot over the past three years. His body was a veritable roadmap of scratches, scars, oozing wounds, and a broken arm from his last beating. Nebraska’s initial law could have saved this teenager from years of neglect and abuse.

I used to think that Cinderella was a simple fairy tale told to young children to pass the time. In truth, it is just that- a fable. Cinderella had it easy.