A baby boy was found deceased in a dumpster Monday in Hollywood, Florida — and some media reports are subtly implying that the state’s abortion restrictions may be to blame, despite clear problems with this assumption.
According to the Sun Sentinel, workers from a roofing company found the infant as they were throwing away debris. David Vasquez, the worker who found the body, told CBS News he saw a blue bag in the dumpster, and upon opening it saw the infant’s lifeless body. First responders later said they believe the infant may have been there for days.
Like every state in the U.S., Florida has a safe haven law which allows a parent to legally surrender their infant if they feel they are unable to care for the child. In Florida, babies up to seven days old may be left at a hospital, emergency medical services station, or fire station.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s like if people don’t want a baby they could have gave it up to the firemen or leave it at a hospital,” Roger Cote, who lives in the area, told CBS News. “It definitely hurts. (Some) people try to make babies but they can’t make babies, they can’t conceive. They could have placed it up for adoption.”
But CBS News interviewed another neighbor, Jessica Gort, who speculated that Florida’s abortion laws will result in more infants being abandoned. “You know, you think about what someone had to go through to get to that point and what happened. I wonder how this might correlate with the way the abortion laws have come about,” she said. “Are we going to see more things like this? Are there girls who are terrified, not knowing what to do?”
Gort’s statement has been shared by a variety of news outlets, yet there is no indication that a state’s pro-life laws correlate to infant abandonment. Florida already allows abortion up to 15 weeks — nearly four months gestation — and most abortions take place within this time frame. So it doesn’t stand to reason that such a permissive abortion law would result in a child being thrown in a dumpster. Similar infant abandonments have also seen in states with extremely liberal abortion laws, like New Mexico and Illinois.
Photo: Reddit user brazen 177 (10-week aborted baby – abortion pill)
Since Florida’s safe haven law was established in 2000, the state has seen an increase in the number of babies safely surrendered, and a marked decrease in the number of those who are abandoned in infancy. The state’s abortion law does not appear to play a role in those statistics.
Abortion is the direct and intentional homicide of a preborn child. Infant abandonment potentially results, as it did in this case, in the death of that very same child. Laws that protect these vulnerable children in the womb should not be blamed for the instances in which children are killed outside of it. Instead, more efforts should be made to protect babies at all stages, and to make parents aware that safe haven laws exist in every state.
