Mike Page , the Public Information Officer for the Grand Junction Fire Department, refelcts on the merit of Colorado's Safe Haven Law

In 2008, a teenage girl spending the summer in Alaska came to Grand Junction to visit her parents, who lived in the Grand Vista Subdivision. She was in town for only a few days when one day her parents noticed an odor coming from her room. One day, while she was out, her parents looked in her closet and found the body of her dead newborn baby, less than one week old.
Incidents like this, where infants less than a year old are murdered or abandoned, occur about 100 times a year in the United States. The Grand Vista baby was the latest to happen in Grand Junction, and is one of 12 known babies that have died from being abandoned by their mother in the State of Colorado since 2000. What truly makes these deaths a tragedy, however, is that the state of Colorado passed the Colorado Safe Haven for Newborns Law in 2000 to prevent these very kinds of situations.
“It’s a tragedy that doesn’t have to happen,” said Janine Dyke, an advocate for Safe Havens for Newborns, a national organization that allows mothers to take their newborn baby and drop it off at any hospital or fire station, no questions asked, and walk away knowing their baby is alive and ready to be put up for adoption.
Most of these mothers, according to Dyke, are too young and scared to know what to do.
“Most of the girls that go through this feel ashamed,” she said. “They’re in a state of denial, too embarrassed to tell their family. When the baby does come they get in a state of panic, and in that state they abandon the baby.”
The highest risk right now in the state of Colorado, according to Dyke, is a Caucasian, 19 year-old Christian with a college background. Because most of these girls are considered “good” girls and come from stable homes, they feel as though they have something to lose. As a result, they think their best option is to abandon their babies.
“I know of one baby that was found at the bottom of a urinal,” Dyke said, “and you’re just wondering what is going through those girls’ minds, how much they must be scared and panicked. It’s as if they don’t view it as a human being, they almost see it as a burden and can only think, ‘What am I going to do now?’”
The problem, though, is that most people don’t know about the Safe Haven Law.
“The biggest barrier is that ladies don’t believe that they can give away that baby without having any penalties come to them,” said Mike Page, the Public Information Officer (PIO) for the Grand Junction Fire Department. “It’s just a matter of getting the right information to the right people at the right time to really make a difference. We want to find these people before it happens, but that’s difficult to do.”
Even though the law has been in place for over 10 years, neither St. Mary’s Hospital nor the Grand Junction Fire Department have had any mother come to them with her baby.
“In Mesa County as a whole, three people have utilized the Safe Haven Law,” said Karen Martsolf, the PIO for the Grand Junction Department of Human Services. “But since 2005, two infants, born to young mothers, have died in Mesa County. In all likelihood, both infants could have survived if the Safe Haven Law was utilized.”
“And the sad thing about that,” Dyke said, “is that there are most likely far more babies that have been abandoned but simply not found, just because there are so many places you can hide a baby. Meaning the number of babies that die per year is probably much higher.”
The best method of prevention, however, is being there for the mother during these initial stages.
“They need people helping them, being there for them,” Page said. “I think parents talking to kids and letting them know that whatever happens to them that they’re there for them makes more of a difference than anything.”
“A first step is definitely to just talk to somebody,” said Dyke. “There are churches here in Grand Junction that will talk to anybody who has an STD, who is scared, without passing judgment, and will give them options like the Safe Haven Law to let them know what to do.”
Very few people seem to know about the Safe Havens option, so educating the public is the number one priority for all involved.
“We want to put signs on the sides of buses and in front of businesses,” Page said. “But the problem is that it sometimes gets lost in the priority system because of the lack of significant numbers. Unfortunately, this tragedy doesn’t receive the attention it needs to prevent it from happening again because it doesn’t happen often enough.”
“That’s why I’ve become an advocate here on the Western Slope,” said Dyke, who is a senior nursing student at Mesa State. “We’re just trying to spread the word. An ounce of prevention can help so much more than getting the word out after a tragedy has already happened.”
Page said that even if he goes through all this work and only one baby ends up being saved, then all the work was worth it.
“There are a lot of parents who would love to have a child but can’t,” he said, “so having a baby not survive is the worst. Having a baby who does survive and is given to a family who can take care of it and give it a good life, that’s what we want to see.”
For more information on Safe Havens for Newborns or to volunteer you can call the Colorado headquarters in Denver at 303-795-0416.
If you are a parent in crisis and want to learn more about your options you can call the national, multilingual hotline at 1-888-510-BABY (2229).

tsides@mesastate.edu