This doesn’t have to keep happening!
If you are having a baby or if you have a newborn infant at home that you just can’t take care of, then please know you have options, which would allow you to legally and anonymously surrender the newborn with no questions asked. One of these options is as close as the Corbin Fire Department.
I bring this up following a recent incident in Fayette County where Lexington Police arrested a University of Kentucky student-athlete for concealing the birth of her infant child. Officers found the child dead in a trash bag inside the closet of her home.
The mother allegedly admitted to officers that she had cleaned up after giving birth and put the baby and the cleaning supplies in a trash bag.
The mother, Laken Snelling, 21, was charged with tampering with physical evidence, concealing the birth of an infant and abuse of a corpse.
We don’t know yet how the baby boy died. More testing is needed, according to the Fayette County Coroner’s Office.
I think I can speak for nearly everyone when I say that hopefully, the baby was still born or died from some other natural cause rather than Snelling doing something to her newborn to cause its death.
Snelling was a member of the U.K. STUNT Team, which is a competitive cheer stunt sport. However, since her arrest she has withdrawn as a student at the school, according to published reports.
She certainly wouldn’t be the first young woman to try and conceal the birth of a child and probably not the last.
Sadly, this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Back when I was in college some three decades ago at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, I worked for the school newspaper, The Eastern Progress. I remember writing a follow-up story on a cold case from a couple of years earlier where a newborn infant was found deceased at a local landfill. There was a decent chance that the mother had been a student at EKU. To the best of my recollection, the cause of death was unclear.
To my knowledge, they never discovered who the mother was and probably never will.
If you have an unwanted newborn or can’t care for one, please know that under Kentucky law, there are multiple places, such as hospitals, EMS providers, police stations and fire stations where a parent can come in and legally surrender a newborn child up to 30 days old with no questions asked.
One of these options is the Safe Haven Baby Box, which was unveiled two years ago at the Corbin Fire Department along Main Street. There are others located in Kentucky and other states.
The box has a small door that opens from outside of the fire department. There are no outside cameras monitoring the door.
Once you open the door, you can place a baby inside the box and shut the door. Sensors inside alert authorities that there is now something or someone inside the box and an alarm goes off within a minute.
If a baby ever gets placed inside, then the fire department, police and other employees at city hall are alerted.
Once a child is found inside, it is taken to the hospital to get checked out and then is placed in a home.
It is sad that such a thing is needed, but what’s sadder is a newborn baby dying because someone abandoned it.
Hopefully, no mother with a newborn child ever feels the need to use this Safe Haven Baby Box. If they give birth to a child that they can’t or don’t want to care for, then I am happy they have an option that will allow them to safely surrender the baby rather than doing something rash like killing it.
Would knowledge of something like Safe Haven Baby Boxes or ways to surrender an infant child have made a difference in the Snelling case? If the child was still born, then the obvious answer to that question is no. If it wasn’t, we might never know.
Could knowledge of such a program make a difference in future cases? Maybe, and that is why I write this column.
If you find yourself facing an unplanned pregnancy, then please be brave, have the child and give it a chance to be placed in a good, kind, loving home. Remember, there are thousands of couples out there, who can’t have children but desperately want to start a loving family.
The Safe Haven Baby Boxes program also offers free and confidential counseling through their hotline at 1-866-99BABY1.
