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No Questions Asked

Well, Maybe Just a Hundred or So

By Robert Kumpel

The Save a Baby bill could be in danger of regulation overkill. This law, authored by State Senator Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga), was signed into law by Governor Davis last September. Intended to prevent "dumpster" abandonment of newborns, the law allows the mother of an infant 72 hours old or younger to surrender the child to any hospital emergency room without fear of prosecution. The spring 2001 edition of the California professional journal, Perinatal Care Matters, reports that some have criticized the law as legitimizing infant abandonment.

Of particular concern is PCM's report that hospitals need to know how to assess the infant's age, how to provide health screening, and how to support families surrending children. California hospitals are working on surrendered-baby policy: designation of employees to take custody of infants, medical screening exams, and a medical questionnaire that would have to be provided to the surrendering person. The questionnaire would have to be contain a confidential identification code to match the infant.

Could the questionnaire discourage mothers from surrendering children? Catherine Ewers of Birthline (offices in Chula Vista and Clairemont) worries, "If a young woman can only avoid prosecution by going into an brightly-lit emergency room and be confronted with a questionnaire, will she be willing to do that? I talked with a social worker at the department of social services in Sacramento about that, and she said, 'You must consider that she (the mother) probably needs medical help herself.' But if you take it from her point of view, she's not going to want it there at that time. It's a Catch-22.'

"Right away, the hospitals are concerned with the bureaucratic problems and rightly so. They have to be concerned about the father of the baby and whether he'll come back and demand the baby. To put the baby up for adoption, they might need his signature, and all sorts of legal problems -- but you've got this 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girl who's going to throw her baby in a dumpster, and we're going to try to help her to save that baby's life and save her from that guilt. You've got to have some compromise from the bureaucratic problems. My main concern is publicity, that more people know about the law. Unless it is marketed to the public, the law will not serve its purpose. People have got to know that it's available."

Brulte has proposed a bill to appropriate three million dollars to advertise the new law. A spokesman (who asked not to be named) from Brulte's office thinks the proposal, senate bill 101, will pass. When asked about the possible encumbrance of questionnaires at hospitals, the spokesman said, "That is not part of the legislation. There are to be no questions asked. You drop the baby off and there's a two-week "cooling off period," The law is supposed to make it easy for the mother. We're not looking to increase bureaucracy." Ewers is asking everyone to call their state legislators to encourage them to pass the publicity bill.

So how are the local hospitals implementing the law? Sharp Healthcare spokesman Wendy Hastings says that although they do have questionnaires for mothers who leave their children, they are not mandatory. "We had a task force to develop a policy and we went from the letter of the law, which says 'the hospital has to make a good faith attempt' to get medical information, but it doesn't say we have to. So when we wrote our policy, we followed the law almost exactly and we wrote into the policy specifics for each entity: specifics for the women's hospital (Mary Birch) and for the ER. If somebody comes in with a baby, we have a security desk right up front on the first floor of Mary Birch, and they are to go ahead and take custody of the baby and make a good-faith attempt to offer an identification band, and the only identification on the band is a number. We band all of our babies with an I.D. bracelet, but we wouldn't put any information on the bracelet, just matching numbers like we do for all of our patients. We would attempt to offer the adult-sized band to the mom, so that if she wants to come back and claim it, she'll have something to say that she is entitled to this baby. We also attempt to offer the questionnaire , and they can fill it out there and leave it, which I doubt will ever happen, or they can take it and mail it back in with the self-addressed stamped envelope, or they can refuse it and run out the door. After that, a nurse from the neo-natal intensive care unit is summoned to come out and take over custody of the baby, call social services and child protective services right away. Custody will go right to Child Protective Services. The physicians group on our task force decided that the neo-natologists would do the medical screening exam, which is also required by law."

Hastings says that since the law went into effect this year, no one has left an unwanted baby with the hospital, but she believes that public awareness will change that. "One of the social workers on the task force contacted a colleague in Texas, where they've had a similar law for a few years. They said that it took a year or so for word to get out into the community, then they saw an increase in babies being dropped off."

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