Baby boxes are suddenly everywhere

When I was in Alabama reporting my story about low-income women being pressured into long-term birth control, I had coffee with a doula who had a really interesting story. Her mother had abandoned her at birth on a doorstep, and was then arrested for child abandonment. Today, that might not happen, she told me, because the state of Alabama was installing “baby boxes”—devices for the anonymous surrender of newborns. I was intrigued, and my story about the spread of these devices is out today, and in the next issue of the magazine:

Why Baby Boxes Are Suddenly Everywhere

The spread of these devices, which cost around $16,000 and are installed in fire stations and hospitals, is somewhat astounding. There were just 29 in 2020, and now there are more than 350. They’re going into mostly red states that have banned abortion because, as one lawmaker told me, “To be a pro-life state, you have to give options,” which is kind of an ironic statement overall.

But there are many critics, too. In Nov. 2024, a bunch of doctors, lawyers, and ethicists wrote a letter to HHS arguing that the boxes are unregulated and “fraught with unintended harms and negative consequences.” One of the biggest problems seems to be that they don’t facilitate face-to-face surrender, in which trained professionals can check in on a mom and make sure she’s ok. They also don’t let the mom take her child back if she changes her mind: in Alabama, babies can be formally adopted within 6 weeks.

Other people argue that baby boxes are unnecessary. That’s because since around 2000, most states have passed safe-haven laws that allow parents to surrender a newborn to hospitals and fire stations without repercussions, a law that would have helped the mom of the doula I had coffee with. Safe haven laws at least facilitate a face-to-face surrender, and many safe haven groups try to keep families together and provide the moms with the resources necessary to raise their children, if they so desire. While reporting this story, I read Relinquished, a 2024 book by Gretchen Sisson about adoption in the U.S., and found it very relevant: it turns out many moms would keep their babies if they had resources like a car seat or $1,000. Baby boxes do not try to keep mom with child.

“There’s a place for anonymous surrender, but is that what we want to push?” says Leah Kipley, assistant director of the National Safe Haven Alliance. “That’s what’s been around since the Middle Ages.”

One thing that struck me was how, for many people, baby boxes seemed to be devices that generate a supply of infants for loving families who want to adopt. This minimizes the trauma of a birth mom who has likely given birth alone at home and has to make the difficult decision to give up her child. We don’t want to acknowledge the mother, or think about the birth mom in crisis,” says Grace Howard, a professor at San José State University and the author of The Pregnancy Police: Conceiving Crime, Arresting Personhood, which follows state attempts to criminalize and surveil pregnant women. “If we acknowledge the mother, then we look at the people adopting these brand-new infants, and it’s not romantic anymore. It’s a tragedy.”

Read more of my story here:

Why Baby Boxes Are Suddenly Everywhere

I also wrote about why afterschool programs are disappearing across America, partly inspired by my own town’s insufficient afterschool system. It still astounds me that the work day is 8-9 hours and the school day is 5-6 hours and no one seems particularly incensed that there are not a whole lot of options for reconciling those two. Many families have two working parents because they have to, and they don’t have a lot of options for what to do with their kids when school is out.

Lastly, I covered why Medicare’s telehealth options ended Oct. 1 and who that’s going to hurt. They may go back up if the government ever does, but as of right now, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of progress on either

Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT)

I am currently listening to Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel. A few things I did not know about Meir, the first (and only) female prime minister of Israel is that 1. She actually grew up in Milwaukee (like my own grandmother!) and emigrated to what is now Israel in the 1920s and 2. her name was Golda Meyerson until David ben-Gurion pressured her into Israel-izing it into Golda Meir. I like learning her diplomatic tactic of essentially leaning into the Jewish grandmother role — even when she was fairly young — and pressuring heads of state into doing what she wanted them to do. She traveled to Israel aboard the SS Pocahontas, which was essentially a cursed ship because a bunch of dock workers kept sabotaging it, which confirms my previously held belief that boats are always less fun than you’d think.