Child dumping spurs Nebraska to revisit safe haven law
Nebraska officials are rethinking the state's safe haven law after numerous infants and teenagers have been abandoned at the state's hospitals.
The law, as it stands, permits people to drop off unwanted or unruly children through age 17 at a hospital with no questions asked. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman and 40 of 49 members of the unicameral legislature agree that the law needs to be revisited and modified to establish an age limit that would apply only to infants up to three days old.
Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel notes that the next legislative session in the Cornhusker State is in January, and that the governor is reluctant to call a special session to vote. Staver disagrees.
"A special session should be called so that this law is reserved for its proper purpose, that it doesn't have this open-endedness to it because, in the meantime, what's going to happen?" he asks. "People can come here [and] dump off their children and then simply walk away, throw all their cares on the doorsteps of a hospital, and just simply walk away as though there's [sic] no consequences to that."
Putting an age cap on the safe haven law would move Nebraska's law from the most lenient to among the most restrictive. Staver believes something ought to be done to keep families together. "And a culture of life instead needs to be established, as opposed to this throwaway kind of mentality," he contends.
So far at least 18 children have been dumped at Nebraska hospitals, including nine from one family. Two children were brought from neighboring states. Sixteen other states have a similar three-day-old age cap.
Contact: Charlie Butts
Source: OneNewsNow
Source URL: www.onenewsnow.com
Publish Date: October 22, 2008
Link to this article:
http://www.ifrl.org/ifrl/news/081023_6.htm
