Florida program saves 100 infants

St. Petersburg Times

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The young woman standing at the door of the fire station needed help.

Do fire stations still take unwanted babies? Yes, said Lt. Doug Stryjewski, who followed her to a car, where a newborn was wrapped in a towel on the front seat. The woman had given birth that morning.

As he took the baby, he asked if she was OK.

“I’m fine. I just can’t handle this right now,” she said. Then she got in the car and drove away.

That May 30 exchange was remarkable for firefighters, who took turns holding the infant until hospital workers arrived. But it also was a landmark for Florida’s Safe Haven for Newborns program.

Nicholas was the 100th baby to be dropped off at a fire station or hospital in Florida since the law was passed in 2000 amid numerous reports of babies discarded in trash bins and bathrooms.

At the time, Florida was one of 15 states to create such a law. Now, every state has one. Florida recently expanded its law to allow mothers to leave babies up to 7 days old without fear of criminal prosecution. Previously, the limit was three days.

The baby left at the fire station was named after Nick Silverio, who created a nonprofit foundation in 2001 to spearhead education about the new law.

An article he read in Reader’s Digest about infant abandonment inspired Silverio, 65, who owns a software company in Miami.

The Miami-based organization, which began with two members, has grown to include 300 volunteers and 43 chapters statewide. It relies mostly on donations for its $300,000 annual operating budget.

Volunteers deliver literature about the law to state hospitals, clinics and fire stations. They staff a multilingual hot line, which gets seven or eight calls a day.

In some cases, women decide to keep their children after volunteers connect them with medical and social services.

“Someone might have said, ‘We’ll come and get the child,’ and that’s not our objective,” Silverio said. “Our objective is to help the mom on what she wants to do.”

This fall, the group will reach into high schools to distribute materials about the law to teens.

“They’re kids having kids, and they don’t know what to do, and they panic, and they’re afraid to tell their parents or a trusted adult, and then they make the decision they make,” Silverio said. “There’s help available, and it’s a matter of letting them know that.”

The group isn’t involved in placing abandoned babies. Once a baby is dropped off, firefighters call a local hospital, where workers deal directly with private adoption agencies.

Nationwide, concerns exist over the babies’ lack of medical histories and fathers’ rights. Critics also say that the underlying issues behind abandonment, such as pregnancy prevention, go unaddressed.

Silverio believes those naysayers are missing the point. The law is meant to confront reality and save lives, not to dissect social issues.

“Mothers were leaving babies in dumps and canals,” Silverio said. “That’s what was happening, and that’s why the law was passed.”

On a national scale, it is hard to gauge the program’s effectiveness because there isn’t a central tracking method of the infants saved.

But, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which has updated data for seven states, hundreds of babies have been saved.