JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville City Councilman Rory Diamond (R- Dist. 13) is pushing to have so-called “Safe Haven Baby Boxes” installed across the city to help struggling parents give up newborns they can no longer care for.
Diamond held a briefing at the city on Wednesday morning, advocating for it. To his surprise, there were none in Jacksonville. Now he’s pushing for 14 of them, one in each council district.
“You go to a fire station, one of 14 in the city, place the baby in the baby box, the baby box is heated, it has proper oxygen levels, and most importantly, it’s monitored so that immediately JFRD and the Jacksonville Sheriffs office is notified so they can come and rescue the baby out of the box,” Diamond explained.
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Safe Haven Laws have existed since 1999, and were enacted in Florida in 2000. They currently allow parents to surrender an unharmed infant under 30 days old to hospitals, fire stations, and EMS providers. So why are baby boxes necessary?
“But you have to surrender to a person, and what we’re finding out is that….” Diamond said. “There’s a stigma attached to that. And so this eliminates the stigma; you don’t have to talk to anybody. No one’s gonna ask you any questions,” he continued.
The total cost to buy and place a box in each district, Diamond says, amounts to $380,000. Add a maintenance fee of $5-6,000 a year. Diamond suspects private nonprofits will step in for the maintenance funding, so he’s in talks with local churches to help foot the bill.
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The bill for the boxes will be up for discussion in committees starting the first week of April, and the final vote will possibly be around April 14.
“I strongly believe this is going to pass 19 to 0,” Diamond said.
According to Yale University, 100 medical professionals sent an open letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, citing the potential downsides of these boxes. They say the boxes allow for the baby’s medical history to be left unknown, and they conceal cases of rape, incest, and human trafficking because they’re anonymous.
Opponents add that safe haven boxes aren’t government-regulated. Safe Haven says the product couldn’t be as the FDA doesn’t consider it a medical device.
They say it also can’t be regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, as it’s not a commercial product. The boxes are typically designed to meet fire station regulations, however.
“It protects the child. We were all children at one time, we were all babies at one time...” Gerri Wigan, Duval Republican Party Chaplain, said.
If this measure is approved, Diamond hopes to have the boxes installed by this summer.
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