A woman drove from suburban Atlanta to Nebraska this past weekend to leave her 12-year-old son at a hospital there, making him the 20th child abandoned under a state law that allows parents to leave children younger than 18 at medical facilities without facing criminal penalties.
The law was intended to allow new parents to relinquish unwanted infants. The mother of the 12-year-old boy abandoned Saturday was the third parent to travel from another state to give up a child.
Gov. Dave Heineman and leaders of Nebraska’s state Senate have vowed to rewrite the law when the legislature reconvenes in January to apply only to infants up to 3 days old. Colorado’s safe haven law has a similar age cap.
The mother of the boy abandoned this weekend, who has not been identified, told the Lincoln Journal Star that she had hoped to send her son to Boys Town, where she spent two years as a teenager. She said the boy was in trouble at school and with police and that efforts to find help in Georgia were fruitless. She also had tried to send him to relatives in other states.
“I’ve been fighting so long,” the woman told the newspaper. “I can’t fight any longer.”
