Illinois is celebrating nearly three years without a baby being illegally abandoned, almost 25 years after the passage of a state law allowing parents to surrender infants legally to “safe havens.”
The Illinois Abandoned Newborn Infant Protection Act allows people to anonymously drop off unharmed infants up to 30 days old at designated places — such as hospitals and police and fire stations — without fear of facing civil or criminal liability.
Babies surrendered through the program have a much better chance of survival than when they are illegally abandoned.
A baby hasn’t been illegally surrendered in Illinois since July 2023, according to the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation. That’s a total of more than 1,000 days and counting, nearly double the previous record of 577 days from October 2017 to May 2019.
Dawn Geras, the group’s executive chair, said the milestone made her emotional as she thought back to when Illinois’ version of the bill, inspired by headlines she had read about abandoned children who died, was drafted around her kitchen table before it was passed in 2001.
Now some of the children who were surrendered in the first years after the legislation was passed gather in the area for a reunion of “safe haven cousins.” Many of them are now in their 20s.
“We’ve never gone this long [without an illegal surrender],” Geras said. “It makes me want to cry. … We’ve been able to watch these babies grow up.”
Since the state law was enacted, 163 infants have been legally surrendered at safe havens in Illinois, according to Save Abandoned Babies Foundation data. In the same period, 84 babies were illegally abandoned.
In some cases, parents who illegally surrendered their babies were charged with attempted murder. Of the 84 kids not left at safe havens, about half of them died. About 20% of them were later adopted.
Heidi Mueller, director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, said she admires the law for keeping kids safe and connecting parents in crisis with resources such as mental health and housing services.
Children surrendered through the program bypass the foster system and are immediately put up for placement with families through several different agencies. That means they don’t generally end up in DCFS care. In 30 cases, the parent who initially tried to surrendered their child decided to keep them after being presented with resources by officials at safe haven locations, according to Save Abandoned Babies Foundation data.
Either way, Mueller said the sooner kids can be connected with families, the better.
“It was great foresight to pass this law,” Mueller said. “This approach keeps kids safe … and ensures kids aren’t coming into DCFS care, which can be detrimental for young people.”
And there is still work to be done on the policy itself, she said. While the group got college campus police stations added to the law as safe haven spots years ago, she said they have continued to try to expand educational outreach efforts in high schools and universities.
“We wrote a law, now what are we gonna do with that?” Geras said. “The law would be no good if nobody knew about it.”
The work goes beyond the state as well. Geras’ organization meets monthly with representatives from around the country to advise them on the Illinois model and signs to try to make them more universally recognizable.
Some states don’t include police stations as places for babies to be surrendered. Five states, including Wisconsin and Michigan, only allow babies up to 3 days old to be given up.
Illinois originally had the 3-day provision in its law, but it was later expanded to seven days in 2006, and then eventually the current 30-day rule in 2009, Geras said.
“What we’ve learned in the past 25 years has allowed us to make the law better than it was in the beginning,” Geras said. “We’ve been a role model to so many other states. But there are a lot of states that that’s still not the case.”