Monica Kelsey and Safe Haven Baby Boxes, Part 1 of 2

When Monica Kelsey of Indiana, USA, was in her thirties, she discovered that her biological mother was raped at 17 and had abandoned her at a small hospital two hours after giving birth. It was a challenging revelation to accept, and it tested her faith in God. But ultimately, this knowledge inspired Ms. Kelsey to provide a way for parents to surrender their newborn children anonymously. She founded Safe Haven Baby Boxes in 2014 and turned it into a nonprofit the following year. Since then, the organization’s dedicated phone line for mothers in crisis has handled more than 8,000 calls.

In the United States, laws exist that allow individuals to leave unharmed newborn infants with personnel at designated locations. While safe haven laws help protect the lives of vulnerable newborns, they fail to provide privacy for the parents. That’s the main advantage of Ms. Kelsey’s initiative.

“Anonymous means you don’t know my skin color, you don’t know if I’m a man or a woman, you don’t know if I have blond hair or dark hair. And so, confidential for some people is OK, but some people want that anonymity to where no one knows their identity. And that is why it’s so important for us to get these boxes in every state.”

“A baby box is just exactly what it sounds like. It’s a box where it houses a baby for a minimal amount of time. The box is heated. So there’s heat on the inside, and a medical bassinet on the inside as well. The average time for newborns inside our boxes – from the time the parent places the baby in to the time a firefighter pulls the baby out – is right about two minutes – just enough time for the parent to get away and to not be known.”

“Most of our newborns that are placed in our boxes are not born in hospitals, and so they need immediate medical care. The firefighters, the paramedics, the EMTs, the nurses at hospitals, they’re equipped to take care of these newborns. And what they do is they take the child from the box, take it to the hospital, and then turn it over to the Department of Child Services.”