Safe Haven Saving Kids?

Nebraska Lawmakers took a step toward changing the safe haven law that has put it in national news for the last several months. Gov. Heineman called an emergency legislative session after over 30 kids, mostly teenagers, have been left at Omaha hospitals. The state legislature is planning on changing the law, which does not specify the age a child must be in order to be protected by the law, to apply to infants up to 30 days old. 

Some lawmakers are unhappy about the idea of changing the law, they cite the fact that the current law takes into account children that are endangered or mentally ill or dangerous. All of the children that have been abandoned under the law so far have fit into this description. 

Some supporters of the existing law say that the number of children abandoned highlights the problems in Nebraska’s and other states’ mental health and child services. This is a very good point and should be considered by all state legislatures.

However, the question I find most interesting is why the Nebraska legislature didn’t define the age of the children the safe haven law applied to. Nebraska was one of the last states to institute a law in which the purpose was to prevent overwhelmed new parents from leaving their newborns in dumpsters. This kind of law is not a new concept so why did Nebraska legislatures have such a hard time deciding what age the cutoff would be?

Now that the governor and the legislature have seen the consequences of not defining the word “child”, they’ve decide that 30 days old is a good cut off age and will probably vote on a final version of the law on Friday. Even so, the situation with Nebraska’s safe haven law has hopefully opened eyes about the desperation of parents all over the country.