Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, there has been a steep drop-off in the number of children put up for adoption.
The number of babies born and put up for adoption in the United States dropped from 9 percent in 1973, the year the U.S. Supreme Court implemented some of the world’s least restrictive abortion laws, to just 1 percent between 1996 and 2002, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That 1973 number included 20 percent of babies born to unwed white women.
Over the past couple of decades, however, there has been another way for women to safely surrender their newborn babies that both pro-life and pro-abortion organizations support: Safe Haven laws. Each of the 50 states has one.
Massachusetts’s Safe Haven law was enacted in 2004, when Mitt Romney was governor. It allows a mother to drop off her unharmed newborn at a hospital, police station, or fire station within seven days of birth without repercussions and without providing any personal information. The purpose of the law, its advocates say, is to prevent infanticide. From 2000 to 2004, before the law went into effect, there were 13 baby abandonments in Massachusetts alone, including six deaths. That included one on UMass Amherst’s campus in 2002 where a student reportedly gave birth in a shower stall and then put her baby in the trash, as the Massachusetts Daily Collegian reported in 2004.