Baby Boxes

Made Great Again

I can’t get excited about baby boxes being installed across the state and country. I was cleaning and heard a news clip in the background that drew me to the living room TV.  I listened to the reporter extoll the installation of the 9^th baby box in Tennessee.  Is that a good thing?  Something about it doesn’t sit well with me.  

In February 2023, I got a similar ich feeling when they reported the first 1^st baby box in the state had been installed in Knoxville at a Fire Department.  A few months later in June, they celebrated the first baby drop complete with a viral TikTok. This phenomenon is a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade as some kind of humanitarian “good Samaritan act” to address baby abandonment.

There would be little need for baby boxes without the draconian abortion laws enacted in many states after the Dodd decision. Baby boxes are a resurrected medieval practice that was abandoned in the late 19^th century.  Originally called “foundlings,” baby boxes are rooted in an old Catholic practice that scarred and stigmatized women for centuries. Baby boxes in Tennessee are being sponsored by Christian charities and Safe Haven Baby Boxes, Inc. The founder, Monica Kelsey, started the company after learning she was abandoned as an infant and after seeing a "Baby Box" in operation at a church, in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Lori Bruce, a bioethicist at Yale School of Medicine, described baby boxes as a poor solution to infant abandonment, “because we know things like prenatal care are more integral to the health of an infant, as well as to the birthing parent.”  She would like to see states consider allowing women to labor and deliver at hospitals anonymously — as Jane Does — so they can relinquish their newborns in a safer setting. 

I agree and it would be even better if women had autonomy over their own bodies and pregnancy decisions. Thankfully there are organizations like Bastard Nation: The Adoptee Rights Organization and Stop Baby Boxes Now (SBBN) an online advocacy community who also think that anonymously shoving an inconvenient newborn into a hole-in-the-wall deposit box does more harm than good.  

SBBN says this deceptive relinquishment practice is rooted in shame and secrecy and creates a population of adopted people who have no birth records, identity, or history. 

Baby boxes are just another example of the regressive agenda of the far-right Christian Nationalism movement to “Make America Great Again.” A bleak backward lunge into a mythical past where white conservative men made the laws for all of us; consider this a preview of what’s to come —see Project 2025. It is the 40-year wish fulfillment of white Christian nationalism intent on erasing gains of the civil rights movement. This Election will determine how fast it happens. This religiosity being forced on the nation means our representative democracy becomes a theocracy!  They’ve politized religion with malice and intent; assembled an army of converts to wage their culture war. We stop them at the ballot box, can’t let them box us in again!