The state of Virginia recently announced a “first.” A Baby Box is a climate-controlled incubator located in the basement of the Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Someone can walk down to the “box,” deposit their baby, and close the door. The person then has a pre-ordained amount of time to leave before an alarm sounds notifying hospital staff that they have a new arrival. Once you get over the knot in the pit of your stomach at this process sounding more like an Amazon order being delivered rather than a live human being, we can all be thankful that something like this exists.
One could probably get published on Google Scholar with a peer-reviewed paper on how we as a culture have turned marriage into nothing but a mutually agreed contract tantamount to buying a condominium in Chatsworth. The natural ramifications of that mindset have turned children, especially babies, into a kind of product. They are certainly viewed this way via the process of surrogacy, where legally binding contracts are part of the process and stipulations are inserted in the event the “deal” produces a defective product.
Los Angeles, in particular, has demonstrated that we are ahead of the cultural game. The ability for someone to drop a newborn baby off in Los Angeles has been an option for several years. The “Baby Safe Surrender Program” has multiple locations across Los Angeles County. From fire stations to hospitals, a baby born within 72 hours can be safely — and without judgment — be given up by their mother. There is even a holding period of two weeks in the event the mom has some kind of “seller’s” remorse.
The temptation upon hearing news stories like this is to jerk one’s knee up to their chin and exhale in exasperation. Thoughts of just how low we can go as a society are soon to follow. I know they do for me. You can make yourself feel even worse when you learn that the California program, in all its expansiveness, has only saved 250 babies in a country where more than a million abortions take place annually. Of course, those statistics do not sound so dire if you are one of those 250 children who were saved by the program and the children who will be saved by the “Baby Box” in Virginia.
I also think about the women who place their babies in somebody else’s care. This is when the oftentimes abused quote from Pope Francis comes to the rescue, at least for me: Who am I to judge? I know nothing about what has brought a person to a point where they feel the need to give their baby away. I think about how much pain they must be in, and even if addled by self-inflicted demons like drugs or alcohol, they have found the grace and courage to do the right thing.
So, God bless the Baby Box and Los Angeles’ Baby Safe Surrender Program. If the Church can turn a Roman torture device into a sacramental, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to envision a future archaeologist unearthing a long-forgotten Baby Box and seeing it as something to be revered.
Maybe in Virginia a few decades from now, a grown man or woman will stand before the Baby Box they were placed in by a mother they never knew. I hope that if they do, they first say a prayer of thanks to God for the life that was granted them. And secondly, I sincerely hope they say a prayer for that woman, who for whatever reason believed she could not care for them, but understood they deserved life. Maybe they could add a prayer for this unknown mother that all the trauma and pain she suffered was eventually left at the foot of the cross — where all trauma and pain should be left.
I am the last person to critique William Shakespeare, but in “Julius Caesar,” he was only half right. Yes, “the evil that men do lives after them,” but I suggest the good things, like the grace-filled decision of a woman in trouble using a Baby Box to save a life, will live on a lot longer.
