Dead Babies

It takes almost a year to adopt a baby. We attended some informational meetings on adopting a baby from China, supposedly an easier route than most, and it was packed. There aren't more unwanted babies out there than adoptive parents that want them, not by a long shot. Yet the news lately is filled with tragic stories of abandoned babies, some of whom do not survive. This one from this a nearby town especially disturbed me.

MOUNT KISCO — It could take several days or a week to get the autopsy report of a newborn girl found in the debris cleaned from a village storm drain, the Westchester County District Attorney's Office says.

"It is presumed that the baby was extracted from one of the catch basins that were cleaned by the Highway Department," Louis Terlizzi, Mount Kisco's acting police chief, said yesterday. "That is what it appears to be right now, but we're still investigating."

The baby was found about 2 p.m. Wednesday near a pile of sediment that had been sucked up by one of the village's vacuum trucks.

A Highway Department worker had cleaned out catch basins with the truck a couple times on Wednesday and returned to the department yard off Columbus Avenue to dump the sediment, Terlizzi said.

The employee saw the body when he returned to the yard a third time to clean out the truck, the chief said.

"He initially thought it was a doll," Terlizzi said. "Upon closer inspection, he realized it was a baby."

Investigators hope the autopsy will determine when the baby died — and whether it was stillborn.

"The best-case scenario would be if it was a stillborn baby but, any way you look at this, there's just no happy ending here," Terlizzi said. The highway worker was "visibly shaken" by the discovery, the chief said.

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The baby girl's discovery comes less than three weeks after a newborn boy was found alive in a plastic bag left in front of a Yorktown home. The baby was in a basket and covered with a blanket inside the bag, which had holes cut in it. He was treated at Hudson Valley Hospital Center in Cortlandt and released to child welfare officials.

His mother, Krishnia Schiaffino, 30, of 470 E. Main St., Jefferson Valley, was charged with felony child abandonment.

Schiaffino is not some destitute, at risk individual living on the fringe of society. She's married and the mother of an 8-year old. Her husband was possibly unaware of the pregnancy. But it isn't just that.

NEW YORK -- A woman whose premature daughter died minutes after birth, and whose tiny corpse was later found mixed in with hospital laundry, has filed a negligence lawsuit against the hospital, her attorney said Thursday.

Verna Uptigrow, 35, of Queens Village, says she suffers from nightmares and depression following the death of her baby, named Isabella Rosa Pickney. The infant weighed less than a pound and only survived about 30 to 45 minutes after she was born on Feb. 19, said Uptigrow's attorney, Dan Flanzig.

"I did get to hold her, I got to feel her breath on my lips," Uptigrow said at a press conference announcing the lawsuit. "I told her I loved her, I told her happy birthday, and then they took her..."

Days after arriving home from South Nassau Communities Hospital, Uptigrow was told by her obstetrician that the infant's body somehow ended up mixed with the hospital's dirty linens.

Shouldn't someone have kept their eye on the ball so that a woman who just lost her newborn can give the child a decent funeral, or to at least dispose of the remains in a respectful way? I know what we went through when we suffered a miscarriage at 11 weeks. I cannot fathom the mother's grief. I'm sure that nobody meant for that babies body to go out with the dirty laundry, literally. But what does this say about our society?

Pro choice advocates probably view these abandonment stories as a reason why we should keep abortion legal, but believe me, in New York it is easier in some ways to get an abortion than it is to buy cigarettes or use a tanning booth.

This may be a very predictable thing to come from a pro life guy like myself, but is this not symptomatic of a society where forces have tried for decades to convince us that babies are not human until the cord is cut? If you have that mentality, what's five minutes, one way or the other, especially if you are desperate?

Comments

[Dave]

My father and stepmother adopted a baby girl from China about ten years ago. I remember it was a big ordeal for them back then, when there were relatively fewer adoptions taking place.

I imagine it has only gotten worse.

[Woody]

"is this not symptomatic of a society where forces have tried for decades to convince us that babies are not human until the cord is cut? If you have that mentality, what's five minutes, one way or the other, especially if you are desperate?"

Bullseye... "The Culture Of Death"

[Jon]

I recommend the Adoption Center of Choice, in Orem, UT. An ethical adoption agency in the USA.