Rarely used ‘Baby Boxes’ are expanding on the MS Coast. Do parents know they exist?

She believes life is precious. So Caitlin Kelly willed Mississippi’s leaders last year to let parents in crisis surrender newborns to authorities in a box.

“A lot of people thought this was crazy,” she said at the Long Beach Fire Department, where an encased, climate-controlled bassinet embedded in a brick wall is monitored around the clock.

Kelly said she was sick of stories about babies left to die in a backpack, or abandoned alone in the woods. So now, mothers and fathers can leave a newborn in the box at Long Beach and vanish down two-lane roads with no trace.

Kelly and others are pushing for more of the same type of boxes on the Coast and better help for women who might one day use them.

Two years after the end of abortion in Mississippi, their mission is growing even as judges and the state’s Child Protective Service say surrenders of babies are rare and the boom in births many predicted would upend life here never came to be.

Boxes are planned in Waveland and Gulfport and are also spreading around the country. And even if no babies are ever placed there, Kelly said the boxes give a confidential choice to women who believe they are unable to care for their newborns but cannot bear to look someone in the eyes and say it.

Mississippi, like other states, has long allowed parents to surrender newborns in a face-to-face handoff to emergency services within a short time frame and face no criminal penalties.

But last year, as Republican leaders sought to strengthen resources for mothers, Kelly convinced lawmakers to expand the law, known as Safe Haven. Now, women can leave their children with a hospital emergency room, adoption agency, CPS, emergency medical service, law enforcement or baby box until the child is 45 days old.

That push aligned with Safe Haven Baby Boxes, a national organization that says it is an alternative to abandonment – not abortion, even though it is often viewed as such. The boxes come with controversy about the safety and rights of both mothers and children. Many also see them as one answer to a future where instead of ending a pregnancy or abandoning their babies, women let them live.

Leaders say the future has not played out as predicted. The state has recorded no surge in births. No babies have appeared in any of Mississippi’s three working Safe Haven Baby Boxes.

None of the children surrendered into Child Protective Services custody last year came in under the Safe Haven Law, which began last summer, the agency said.

Surrenders still happen. At least one child was abandoned early this year behind a dumpster in North Mississippi, according to local news reports. It is unclear how many other children across Mississippi are abandoned illegally.

But the Safe Haven Law and the end of abortion, CPS Commissioner Andrea Sanders said, “ends up not really impacting us.” CPS has studied data on surrenders of children younger than 5, she said, and “they hadn’t gone up any since the law changed.”

Others, too, say safe haven surrenders are rare. Harrison County Youth Court Judge Michael Dickinson said he has seen one case – which did not involve the baby box – in the time since the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion to the states.

“The public had a perception we were going to see a spike,” he said. “In Harrison County, that has not been the case.”

D. Jeffrey White, a Gulfport attorney who handles adoption cases, said he has not yet dealt with a Safe Haven child, although he figured that is because the new law has only been around for one year.

“I’ve not seen an uptick,” he said. “That’s not to say that it wont tick up, with education.”

The reasons may also be rooted in heartbreak. Most women who carry their children to term end up keeping them, Sanders said, because leaving is too painful.

At that point, she said, “it’s really traumatic.”

Still, around the country, Safe Haven advocates say, women make the choice. As the organization added box after box in towns from Indiana to Texas, people surrendered seven babies in 2022, 16 the next year and already, according to the organization’s numbers, 11 babies this year have been left in the boxes’ clear plastic cradles. There are now more than 200 baby boxes across the United States.

Those surrenders have risen not because of the end of Roe v. Wade, said Safe Haven Baby Box founder Monica Kelsey, but because the organization has installed more boxes and began to tell women about them.

Word spread. Kelly said eight other boxes are planned throughout Mississippi, including two at fire stations in Waveland and Gulfport.

At the Long Beach Fire Department, nestled between woods north of the railroad, mothers just need to open the box’s door.

There are no cameras. Any child placed inside will trigger an alarm in the dispatch office down the hall. The box’s outside door locks. The organization says a baby stays in the box for an average of two minutes. The mother is free to leave.

Dispatchers and fire staff take the child in its bassinet and call an ambulance. They call CPS. The child is whisked to a hospital.

Kelly, who is practiced in the art of responding to skeptics, ran through loopholes like a checklist. No one can reclaim the babies, and Safe Haven says just one mother did so after proving the child was hers. A regretful mother or suspicious stranger cannot walk into the fire house and plead that the child is their own.

Private agencies who charge for adoption are not involved. Each baby goes through a database of missing children. Kelly said authorities put out the call for mothers who could be missing a child, in case the infant was taken against someone’s will.

It is often impossible to tell the state of the mother, or any medical troubles she may pass along. But if she chooses, the mother can take an orange bag that falls from the box and fill out medical forms inside, then return them to Safe Haven Baby Boxes, which shares the clues with a child who might one day wonder about the mystery of its mother.

Kelsey’s organization has also begun to teach its work to schoolchildren in Mississippi. Safe Haven Baby Boxes sends an educational video to guidance counselors, health classes and government classes, Kelsey said. They also hand out pens in schools with information on their boxes.

The box in Long Beach is clean and quiet. But the fire department is ready, said its chief, Griff Skellie: Staff checks the box’s alarms and safety systems each Monday.

One day, Kelly said, she would like to see a box in every fire station – no matter if they are used tomorrow, or never.

“The more boxes,” she said, “the better.”