WASHINGTON: Abandoned kids a troubling SOS

A Georgia woman drove hundreds of miles to get rid of hers. A Miami man flew to drop his off. One Nebraska man dumped seven on a hospital doorstep. One woman, who had thrown her hands up in frustration, had second thoughts and wanted hers back.

We’re talking about children, some as old as 17.

No more of this nonsense. As of Friday, distressed and destitute parents will no longer be able to abandon children older than 30 days in Nebraska, as had been allowed under a safe-haven law designed to save newborns.

Talk about bailouts. Can you imagine discarding your child like a bad debt?

Remember when every politician played the “saving the children” song? During the lengthy presidential campaign, you heard little about child-centered initiatives, save some passing reference to helping special-needs children because of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s baby with Down syndrome.

Crime, particularly that committed at the youthful hands of out-of-control and out-of-bounds juveniles, was hardly mentioned. While there were plenty of predictions about which public policy issues President-elect Barack Obama will tackle first, few focused on the troubling mental and moral state of dysfunctional and overwhelmed families.

All is not well here.

We can’t blame everything on the bad economy. However, if ever there was an SOS sign that Americans are not coping well under higher levels of stress, due in part to dwindling dollars, it is surely evident in the number of children abandoned in Nebraska — 36 — since the safe-haven law was passed in July.

Ironically, not a single one of those children relinquished was an infant, said Tracey Johnson, executive director of the National Alliance of Safe Havens. Besides, she added, Nebraska has one of the best social service networks in the country that provides temporary foster care until parents and children “can get their heads back together.”

The laws to prevent so-called “Dumpster babies,” as Mrs. Johnson said, were “not supposed to be used for dropping kids off forever because you are at your wit’s end.”

But one Iowa woman left her pregnant granddaughter in Nebraska, where the baby’s father lives, as a disciplinary tactic, Mrs. Johnson noted. One Omaha father left his children, ages 1 to 17, to be wards of the state because he could no longer feed them after their mother died. Some parents reportedly tricked their children and did not tell them they were about to be on their own — parents who definitely ought to face legal charges.

You wonder where are other family members, friends, neighbors, parishioners and co-workers to help these edgy people. Probably wrestling with their stresses.

Last week these unintended yet unconscionable consequences caused the Nebraska Legislature to hold a special session just to amend its safe-haven law so that the law will apply only to infants up to 30 days old. With the glaring exception of the District of Columbia, this state was the last in the nation to pass a law allowing mothers, usually teenagers, to drop off their infants at hospitals anonymously and without facing prosecution.

Only Nebraska lawmakers went a step farther. They did not place an age limit on the measure because they wanted to protect all children, obviously not realizing the resources they already had in place. So the state got more than it bargained for as some parents crossed state lines to take advantage of the loophole that allowed them to pass off a lot of unruly teens.

We live in a society, Mrs. Johnson said during our long-ranging chat, “where it’s easy to divorce yourself from the things you don’t want on the Internet with a click of a button.” That includes spouses, elderly parents and now children.

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