Editorial: Save babies' lives with modern marketing of safe havens
The city of Wheaton has a police station, three fire stations and at least two emergency medical care facilities within its borders.
A major hospital is next door in Winfield with another just south in Naperville. Wheaton College also has a public safety office.
The mother DuPage County sheriff's police have been looking for since Monday could have gone to any of these facilities and dropped off her newborn baby, no questions asked, assuming the baby was unharmed.
Instead, the mother left her baby to die along a road in an unincorporated area near Wheaton.
What a heartbreaking waste of life. It's for circumstances like this that Illinois and other states have Safe Haven laws.
But do these mothers in crisis know they have an option? Have marketing efforts reached them? It's inconceivable that a mother who cares for her baby's welfare, whether she can take care of the infant or not, would choose to abandon a newly born child on a roadside rather than placing the infant into the arms of a caring health care worker, firefighter or police officer. We don't know the details of why this baby was left to die but we do know its life could have been saved like the 3,227 infants nationally, 114 babies statewide and six babies in DuPage County under Safe Haven laws.
"There are a lot of ways people can help to get the information out there. We just need people to take action so they can share this," said Dawn Geras, founder of the Chicago-based Save Abandoned Babies Foundation that provided those statistics.
"We have a little tag line: "Talk about it. Tell a friend. You might save a life,'" she said.
Others say marketing needs to improve in order to reach the demographic most likely to be in crisis - a very young mother.
"None of the laws are the problem. It's the marketing. It's 100 percent the marketing," said Baby Safe Haven New England co-founder Mike Morrissey in a story by Daily Herald staff writer Jessica Cilella. He said the people who worked on and passed the laws are now mostly 55 to 70 years old.
"You cannot bridge that communication gap. In Massachusetts, we're not afraid to bring out a 15-year-old as the visage of the safe haven law."
Morrissey makes sense. Marketing needs have changed in the 15 years since Illinois' law was passed. Teens today are connected to social media in ways unheard of in 2001.
Illinois should re-energize its marketing efforts - including ensuring that all schools are teaching about safe havens in grades 6-12 as required - and look for new ways to reach mothers before they make a wrongheaded and deadly decision.