For the past couple of months I have been following the developments in the Nebraska Safe Haven Law which went into effect last February making it possible for parents to give up their children to the state if they believed that they could not adequately care for them. A law of good intentions had unintended results. Nebraska did not specify an age limit for the children who could be dropped off at the doorsteps of the government. Alarm bells went off in the state legislature when it was discovered that parents were "abandoning" older children, some of them teenagers. Some parents had driven from other states as far away as Georgia and California to bring their kids to Nebraska. The law has now been revised to limit the age of children who can be dropped off to 30 days or younger.
This brings me to Joe’s recent post about the ballot initiative in Arkansas limiting adoption and foster care rights to heterosexual couples in a "valid marriage." As Joe pointed out, although the law will prohibit heterosexual unmarried couples from adopting children, the underlying impetus for the initiative is to really exclude gay couples from becoming adoptive parents and foster care givers. That the Arkansas law passed with a 57% majority, indicates that a lot of people believe that a valid marriage provides "safe haven" for children. I would hazard a guess that none of the children abandoned in Nebraska was under the care of gay parents and that many came from homes where parents are / were in a valid heterosexual marriage. But things still didn’t work out for the kids and the parents. The problem in my opinion, is that when most people think of marriage and home in an abstract and legal manner, the image in their minds is that of "Father Knows Best" or the "Huxtables" even when their own marital and family situation may be crappy. Parenting skills are a matter of maturity, emotional stability and yes, often the financial security of the care givers. When two people are involved in parenting, the emotional harmony between them too plays a role in the child’s life. Sexual preference or marital status are not factors that determine any of the above. If it did, widowed, divorced and single parents would invariably be failed parents.
The reasons that kids were given up in Nebraska are most likely to be of financial and emotional nature and probably had nothing at all to do with the sexual preference of the parents. Could some of them have been more effectively cared for by nurturing gay couples in stable relationships with superior financial wherewithals? The answer of course is an unequivocal "yes." What about well off and mature single men and women who did not have the time or the inclination for marriage or childbirth during their career building years but who at a certain stage in their lives feel secure and stable enough to adopt a child? Some of these "unorthodox" parents may even have the loving help of an extended family (grandparents, aunts and uncles) who will pitch in with child care. Should such prospective parents be denied the right to a family? What exactly do family values mean? Is it about a "safe haven" for children or is it all about mean hearted prejudices that have no grounding in reality?
Note: I believe that even parents of older kids coping with stressful situations in child rearing and lacking the means for private counseling should be able to seek help from the community and the state without feeling a sense of shame.
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