Safe haven

In New York State, for example, an abandoned baby will spend six months in foster care before the case can even go to court. If the social worker is on top of things, if the birth parents don't show up at court, if no one appeals the case that terminates their parental rights, and if the courts aren't too busy, the baby might be eligible for adoption by the time it's nine months old. If anything goes wrong, though, it could be in foster care for up to two years.

On the other hand, says Dr. Lancour, if the parents have access to counseling and decide to do what's called "permanency planning" before the birth, in New York the baby will spend its first six months in a preadoptive foster family under court supervision, and if all is well at the end of six months, that will become its permanent home.

"I have to believe that people who make the decision to give up their babies don't want their kids sitting in foster care," she says. "They're trying to do the right thing. They want them to have permanent homes."

If little effort is going into tallying abandoned infants or studying the effectiveness of the laws passed in their names, even less is going into seeking information about their birth mothers. Mr. Jaccard says that, although he offers to help the women who call his hotline, the AMT Children of Hope Foundation, and gives them cellphones to reach him, "sometimes they just don't want to be found."

New York State Sen. Nancy Larraine Hoffman, who sponsored her state's "Abandoned Infant Protection Act," says that, because of the elusiveness of these mothers, her law and comparable ones in other states are based on the assumption that mothers who abandon their babies in public - and thus might be persuaded to leave them in safer places - fit a similar profile to those who commit neonaticide.

More is known about these mothers - at least those who get caught. They tend to be girls of about 17, living with their parents, says neonaticide expert Michelle Oberman, professor of law at DePaul University and coauthor of the book "Mothers Who Kill Their Children." In deep denial about their pregnancies, and often concealing them, they frequently do not seek prenatal care and tend to deliver their babies alone - often at home.

When the babies survive, experts speculate that these young mothers may wind up making a choice as Twyana Davis did seven years ago as a college freshman.

"I gave birth to my daughter in my campus dorm room all alone," Ms. Davis, one of the few young mothers who's spoken to the press about abandoning her baby, told National Public Radio last week. Panicking, the straight-A student put her daughter in a dumpster next to her dorm, then called campus security to report a noise outside her window, hoping they would find the baby. They did, and Davis eventually got custody of her daughter. "[But] when I was pregnant and when I gave birth, I wasn't really thinking rationally enough to say, 'OK, well, after I give birth I'm going to take my daughter to a hospital, or I'm going to take her to a fire station," she told NPR.

Nor, critics worry, are most of the parents who leave their babies in public toilets or put them out with the trash.

"It strains the imagination to think that girls who have been so paralyzed for nine months that they've kept their pregnancy a secret could suddenly pull themselves together postpartum to get safe transportation to a hospital or fire station," says Dr. Oberman. "I think we have to ask: Are these laws really reaching these girls?" If they're not, she says, we need to get busy modifying them so that they do.

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