Baby rescuer hits $27 million lottery.
Philanthropists can be rational, too. Note the attention to incentives:
Under the 2001 law, parents have three days to abandon infants without fear of prosecution. California is one of 46 states with such a law.
Faris-Cifelli helped win passage of the law and has made it her life’s work to spread the word that scared and confused parents should drop their newborns at firehouses and hospitals — not in trash cans and alleys. She lobbies in states without such laws, talks to teens and police and has attended 12 trials of mothers accused of abandoning their infants. She also lays the dead to rest.
I’m not sure the law is a good thing. In effect it says that if you have a child you don’t want, you have three days to shift the costs of raising the child to other people. It might very well lead to fewer dead babies, but it could also lead to more abandoned ones, if people react to the law by being less careful about avoiding pregnancy. I’d like to see more data.
That’s a point worth making, but fewer dead babies counts a lot more for me than more abandoned ones. You’d have to show me there’s been a massive increase in the number of abandoned babies and a barely noticeable drop in the number of dead ones to convince me this is a real problem.
– Adam
Russell is right that the ultimate test would be to look at the numbers, although Adam’s intuition about how to weigh them seems right to me, too. I suspect that it would probably be rather hard to gather the numbers and create the proper test. Based on a set of educated hunches about human motivations, I’d predict that the effect of the law would not be to decrease abstinence or contraception and that it would probably have little effect on the numbers of children born. I doubt that people would take into effect the likelihood that they’d have three days to abandon a child legally (and safely) when deciding to have sexual relations. On the other hand, shortly after the birth of a child, young, unprepared, and frightened parents are more likely to do something terrible out of fear of being discovered, required to get married, required to provide for a child for 16 years, or merely facing the anticipated wrath of angry parents. To such people, dropping the baby into a trash bin might seem the best option. I would be surprised if, upon creating a suitable statistical test, we were to find that the law led to any increase in the numbers of abandoned babies (adding together those illegally abandoned by killing them and those legally abandoned by taking them to hospitals, orphanages, and the like).
I’m pretty sure that parents who are willing to abandon their babies — whether legally or illegally — are, in general, unlikely to be very good parents. It’s better to give them the option of abandoning their babies legally and safely without fear of prosecution, than to require them to make the terrible choice of killing the child to avoid detection, on the one hand, or having to face their parents, the police, or whomever, on the other.
Laws regulating the treatment (some would say rights) of children are always iffy because the framers never really mentioned them in the Constitution. It is assumed, I think, that all people in the US have the rights that the Constitution protects, unless you argue that children are the property of their parents. So laws like this that focus on a small aspect of raising kids and ultimately seem to protect them can be useful in settling some of that ambiguity. But like Russell and Professor Palmer, I’d like to see more data.