Oct 28 2008
Nebraska’s 21st child abandoned under safe-haven law
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081028/ap_on_re_us/safe_haven
Another teenage girl abandoned at Neb. hospital
Tue Oct 28, 2008
OMAHA, Neb. – State officials say a 15-year-old girl left at an Omaha hospital is the 21st child abandoned under Nebraska’s unique safe-haven law.
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services’ Todd Landry says the girl from Douglas County, Neb., was left Monday evening at Creighton University Medical Center.
Landry says the girl will remain in a residential shelter while her situation is investigated.
Nebraska’s safe-haven law, which took effect in July, is the only one in the country that lets caregivers abandon children as old as 18 without fear of prosecution.
Most state lawmakers have agreed to amend the law when the Legislature reconvenes in January so that it applies only to infants up to 3 days old.
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The safe-haven law will have to be amended, indeed, seeing that it is being abused left and right. Just because some parents are unable to contend with their teenager’s misbehavior, they are dropping off the kid at the nearest hospital? WTH? Why did they even bother to have kids in the first place if they are going to wind up abandoning them like that? Nebraska is becoming a laughing stock to the nation with this loony law. Their state legislators must have been smoking corncobs laced in absinthe when the safe-haven law was passed. Did they really think people would not try to unload their kids as soon as they were given the chance?
Short of saying that people who breed should be “punished” with having to raise the child (eons ago the Roman Catholic Church once believed that babies are sometimes God’s punishment for sexual intercourse, especially outside of marriage), in my opinion, the safe-haven law should be eliminated completely, then no one will be able to abuse it.
