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This chapter examines how media coverage of specific safe haven relinquishment cases reinforces assumptions about responsible motherhood while also highlighting the pressures in women's lives that may lead them to seek safe haven surrender sites. Focusing on cases of the model use, near-miss use, and misuse of safe haven laws, it explores how birth mothers, birth fathers, and others are represented in media when a baby or child is left at or near an official or presumed safe haven site. In particular, it looks at the use of Nebraska's original safe haven law by mothers, fathers, and grandparents to relinquish distressed teenagers. It also analyzes the stereotype of the “safe haven mom” as a secretive, low-income teenager, who is often a woman of color, along with media coverage of cases of diverse women's safe haven surrender experiences. Finally, it discusses silence around the identity and views of safe haven moms and its implications for safe haven babies and their adoptive families.

This chapter examines representations of pregnant women who cope with “unwanted newborns,” as seen in infant abandonment prevention advocacy, safe haven legal advocacy, and media coverage of women who have abandoned or safely surrendered newborns. Safe haven laws encourage “a subtle structure of surveillance over women, warning society to be alert to mothers who might abandon—or abort—their children.” The chapter considers how this surveillance structure is advanced by advocates who target teenagers and school-age populations. To understand how baby safe haven advocates have publicized the laws and educated the public about the need for them, the chapter looks at public service announcements, short videos, television and radio stories, websites, school curricula, and Facebook pages. It considers how these safe haven awareness campaigns promote visible images of good and bad mothers, and thus narrow ideas about the nature of maternal love and who deserves to be a mother.

This book explores the social politics of legal infant abandonment in advocacy and media discourses surrounding safe haven laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location such as a hospital or fire station. More specifically, it considers the social constructions of motherhood perpetuated by safe haven advocates as well as the social injustices that compel infant abandonment. Using a feminist framework, the book offers insights into the contested nature of what defines good and bad motherhood and examines the issues that surround unsafe infant abandonment from a reproductive justice perspective, with particular emphasis on abortion and adoption politics. This introduction discusses critical perspectives on why we do not need safe haven laws, the cultural components of wanted and unwanted motherhood, and assumptions about maternal love, infant abandonment, adoption, and infanticide. It also provides an overview of the chapters in this book.

This chapter examines the social value of safe haven babies and what contributes to their value. More specifically, it considers what the safe haven baby symbolizes in the adoption market and why some adoption advocates strongly oppose safe havens laws. It also explores the significance of the invisible safe haven mom in discussions of safe haven laws in terms of promoting fast-track adoptions. The chapter begins with an overview of the U.S. adoption system and its treatment of infants by age, race, and class, as well as the extent to which safe haven adoptions differ from planned domestic and transnational adoptions. It then analyzes media accounts of successful safe haven adoptions and comments by adoptive parents in relation to the process of adopting a safe haven baby. It also looks at adoptive mothers' longing to reach out to safe haven moms and the possibility that safe haven babies who are now teenagers may attempt to find their biological parents.

This conclusion summarizes the book's argument regarding safe haven laws and the discourses that support them within the context of reproductive justice, with particular emphasis on the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood experiences as well as the unequal social support available to women and girls. It considers the voices of safe haven moms who have expressed their experiences of relinquishing a newborn at a safe haven site to show how safe haven laws, portrayed by their advocates as offering a good choice for mothers, contribute to public policies and social attitudes concerning mothers and motherhood. It argues that the stated intent of safe haven laws —saving babies—conceals the social injustices that force some women and girls to relinquish their newborns.