Pretty wild! All states give you at least 30 days to dump your baby, no strings attached. Some states give you 60 days!
I feel like more people should know about this! It seems like a highly under utilized ability.
Nebraska had no age limit for a bit. Guy dropped off 9 of his 10 kids(1 was 18) cause he felt overwhelmed after his wife died a year earlier.
“I think there’s a misperception that we just inadvertently left an age cap out. But the reality was we wanted to save lives of older kids who might be at risk,” said Amanda McGill Johnson, a Nebraska state senator at the time.
That actually kind of makes sense? I mean, dropping off teens is excessive, but maybe it highlights an issue? Overwhelmed parents of teenagers isn’t something I had on my list of people that need more help, at least.
That is surprisingly kind for a Nebraskan legislator. Isn’t NE one of the states where they’d rather let women die than abort a fetus?
No, they’d rather let the mother die and get a free child prostitute out of her than to abort a fetus.
10 kids jfc
I’m more concerned how he had ten kids and then felt overwhelmed when his wife left him. Like what the fuck?!
Grieving for a partner definitely doesn’t make it easier to raise your children?!
And I’ve not met many men with 10 kids who are super into doing the whole “dividing the labor of parenting evenly” thing, and I went to catholic schools, I knew some big families. And even if he had been the type to do that, you aren’t winding up being the breadwinner for a family with 10 kids and having both low stress finances and a low stress job. So adding in lots of extra home duties and possibly reduced financial capabilities and mourning will probably wreck you.
That said, I’ve never met a family that large where the parents kept actually parenting beyond number 3 or 4. Some of the most horrifically parentified people I ever met were middle daughters of large families. Also the kids are struggling too, and each of them is likely to have taken some lasting psychic damage from being abandoned by their dad, even temporarily, shortly after their mom died.
Died, not left.
And likely yeah, someone would get overwhelmed doing two peoples’ jobs.
Because he didn’t do Jack raising them probably
Or doubling the responsibilities was too much.
Double it and pass it to the next person
If doubling was to much, it would have been enough to “only” drop 4-5
As long as we are doing hypothetical, he may have been working long hours to pay for all the costs while she was stay at home. When she died, working all the time and trying to care for kids and grieving is going to be massively stressful. Bot to mention the aunt for 7 of the kids decided to have a custody battle so lots and lots of possible things leading to being overwhelmed.
But you clearly assume he is a deadbeat because he’s a man. Have fun with that.
What has him being a man to do with all that
Because he didn’t do Jack raising them probably
Would you have assumed the same lack of parenting if the father had died and the mother dropped off the kids?
I guess it highlights why there should be no age limit… the response to introduce an age limit of 30 days certainly is not the right one.
Wtf! That is insane 🤣 good read!
Most fire stations in the US have at least one person trained as a paramedic/EMT and in many places all of them have at least some medical training. Because in a lot of places fire trucks arrive, there’s people who need immediate medical help.
So they have the basic skills to keep a newborn baby alive until they can get it to a hospital. And if it’s older and healthy, they can just play with it and feed it and clean it as needed until Child Services arrives or it grows up and joins the crew.
or it grows up and joins the crew.
😳
Well, where did you think new firefighters come from?
Defeated fires?
Fascinatingly the fire is an important part of their reproductive cycle. When a firefighter dies in combat, the heat makes their body spread seeds far and wide. After roughly a year, a new crop will be growing from the ashes.
🏅
The larger older firefighters split into two new younger firefighters.
Station!
See, when mommy fire and daddy fire are left alone long enough and it warm and cozy…
The children yearn for the fires
Part of the truck, part of the crew!
In the event that this situation arises, hopefully the mother knows someone is at the station. There are plenty of empty stations that are used by volunteer departments.
Yes as a city dweller I take it for granted that my taxes pay for a professional fire-and-rescue service.
Other Safe Haven locations are hospitals, which makes sense, and some police stations (although I can’t imagine a worse place to leave a baby!)
What about a 956 month old toddler?
Couldn’t hurt to try… sounds very old tho TBH. Have you tried a retirement home?
That’s functionally what the US congress is … so yes?
We keep hoping, but he keeps throwing press conferences.
I’m sure as soon as that toddler goes into a fire, the orange will just disappear into the orange, and that will be that.
At least, one can hope.
They probably wont fit through the slot.
I think at that age, you just send them through the front door and call them a volunteer.
I’d be completely comfortable with doing whatever is necessary to make him fit through the slot, except for augmenting the slot in any way.
A while back I fell into the rabbit hole of people dropping off the baby without informing the other parent. turns out it’s really hard to get the kid back
Omg, that is insane! Imagine coming home from work like
“Honey, I dropped the baby off at the fire station today and the fireman yelled ‘BACK BACK NO TRADE BACK’ when I handed it over, so I’m pretty sure the decision is final. I hope you weren’t too attached to the babe.”
“I dropped Billy off for camp at the fire station. What do you mean thats next week?”
All 50 states of what?
The US is simply where the highest number of anglophones reside. You’d have to sum up the next three nations to get more English speakers than the US (according to worldatlas.com).
Assuming an English speaker on the internet is American is still rude, but not exactly a bad guess - and hardly chauvinism imo
Around 1½ billion people in the world know English, less than ¼ of them live in the US.
I’d bet about 10% of them live in India alone! It’s been my experience that when people think about the global populace as a whole they don’t give India nearly as much weight as it warrants XD
Don’t do numbers at me, if a quarter of the roulette wheel says USA we both know where you’re putting your money.
Again, nobody said it was clean thinking or appropriate to pre-judge, only that you can easily see how the mistake gets made without ever calling it chauvinism.
[…], only that you can easily see how the mistake gets made without ever calling it chauvinism.
This is the point where I strongly disagree with you, constantly mistaking less than ¼ for being the most likely is not easily made, there’s a good reason for why the expression US Defaultism exists, because a particular mindset is required for such a mistake to be easily made.
~25% is a lot when you’re talking about demographics that large. It’s saying that there’s a 1 in 4 chance of any English speaker you encounter being from the US vs every other country in the world.
If you’re looking at native English speakers, it’s about 63%.
But that’s not the point, the point is that more than 3 out of 4 people able to read this post don’t live in the US.
Anglophone is an incorrect metric.
There are more non native English speakers than native English speakers.
On English websites and communities there is no difference between those two as long as the website or community is not specifically for that purpose.
Most people on Lemmy do not live in the US.
Again, and I’ve tried to be very clear about this, I’m not saying they’re correct. We agree that it’s a mistake. I’m explaining how it is an easy mistake to make.
This is a frustrating conversation.
This is a frustrating conversation.
I feel this, deep in my bones, upon reading it.
I found this little cozy spot. I’m gonna curl up in a post right here. *spins 3 times and plops down
For a while, I was trying to start all my comments with things like 'to add… ’ or, ‘just to clarify…’ if I was agreeing but context pr more info or whatever
etc since it seems like the default is to assume any response to a comment is conflict / disagreement.
May be time to bring that back
It starts solid, but then there liquid, gaseous…. Scientists will need to help me with the 47 others here…
Plasma
Bose Einstein Condensate
I mean, there’s like ~22 phases for ice alone.
Ice-nine when?
Right after ice-eight, ofc
50 states of gray
For people with a real punishment fetish
Micronesia
Consciousness
Matter
Uh, the 50 states of our country? Surely you learned about them in elementary school.
It’s clear if you click the link - the article will tell you if your inference skills fail you!
Can you pick them up again at the end of the day? Free daycare would be nice.
Yes, the firemen tend to them until you’re ready to pick them up. It’s a wonderful service.
Back back no trade back!
Can I legally drop someone else’s baby off at the fire station? 🤣
If it’s on fire, yes.
The baby or the fire station?
Yes
Yeah, but when I drop a teenager off at the fire station, they just bring her back home and tell me I can’t do that because it’s considered “child abandonment.”
Shoulda been in Nebraska smh
Have you tried screaming “back back no trade back no trade back” when you drop them?
Sorry you missed the easy return window!
That’s were you messed up. Teenagers are supposed to drop themselves off at the fire station. For older kids they are called “Safe Places” and require them to do all the work.
Yeah my mom always brought that up when I got in trouble
It’s better than leaving them in some men’s room baby changing station with the sign “Place sacrifice here” sign taped to it.
Better for most, but the rest area demon who is sustained on changing station sacrifices really hates this law.
Yeah this directly came out of people abandoning babies in all sorts of place. Some places have these nest type of boxes all padded and temperature controlled where people can leave babies. This is the type of good thing I could see today republicans rallying to stop.
Before fire stations, churches and monasteries did the same thing. And like how some fire stations have a dedicated baby drop box, the churches and monasteries sometimes did, too.
You know, a flight from overseas is expensive to do this, but you got to look at the long term savings…
Until ICE deports the baby right back to you, defeating the whole purpose. What a cruel joke.
Were fire stations included in the places they raid?
Who knows where it would be deported. Would they get to you, in time to make sure its going to the right place? Give clothing branding the wrong country. Hell, ice may deport you before they know.anything about a baby
Lol, they’d just ship it to an El Salvadorian torture prison.
If the kids dropped at the firehouse they would automatically be considered a U.S. citizen unless they had paperwork proving otherwise
Uh, ice doesn’t really care about citizenship.
Reasonable. Now who’s gonna bet that some dip shit in Washington makes it illegal because “mothers should face the consequences of their decisions” or some bullshit.
Call me a cynical old bitch but when the US does something reasonable I always think “how they gonna fuck it up this time?”
Is there an age limit? Cause I know a 15 year old the can have……the little shit.
That’s how rhey recruit new firefighters!
There is something similar called “baby hatch” in Germany, but those are usually located at hospitals. Why the fire station? It makes no sense to me.
They are local to every town and always have people there
Hospitals in the US are kind of scattered, largely as a result of private equity tomfoolery. A lot of communities don’t have one nearby. But pretty much every community has at least a volunteer fire station, and I believe all firefighters are required to be trained in at least first aid, if not be fully-qualified EMTs.
