Hopefully it won’t be needed, but I’m glad Corbin now has a Safe Haven box

Few things in life are sadder than a new born baby dying.

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

The first time I had to write about such a thing was in college at Eastern Kentucky University. I was working at the school paper, The Eastern Progress, and writing a follow-up story on a cold case involving a dead newborn baby. It had been found dead in a nearby landfill, a year or two earlier.

A worker at the landfill saw what looked like a baby and went to check on it. He picked up the deceased infant, carried it to a different place and covered it up out of respect for the child.

Because police weren’t really sure exactly where the body had been found, trying to collect evidence about who the mother might have been proved to be nearly impossible. Authorities were pretty sure that the load of trash that the baby had been found in came from the school though.

To my knowledge, they never discovered who the mother was.

I’m sure it was a sad story to cover when it first happened. It was sad to write about a year or two later too.

I have little doubt that the first responders, who investigated the child’s death, were torn up about it too.

Bad things happening to little children are just tough to deal with.

Fortunately, laws have changed and there are options for mothers, who simply feel that they cannot take care of or deal with a newborn child.

There are multiple places, such as hospitals, where a parent can come in and surrender a new born child with no questions asked.

It’s depressing that such laws are needed to save the lives of children, but they are necessary and needed in the age that we live in.

Now there are more options locally where mothers can surrender babies anonymously.

The City of Corbin recently installed a Safe Haven Baby Box inside the Corbin Fire Department, which is along Main Street. It is the 147^th such box in the nation.

There is essentially a small door that opens from outside of the fire department. There are no cameras monitoring the door.

Once you open the door, you can place a baby inside the box and shut the door. Sensors inside alert authorities that there is now something or someone inside the box and an alarm goes off within a minute.

If a baby ever gets placed inside, then the fire department, police and other employees at city hall are alerted.

Once a child is found inside, it is taken to the hospital to get checked out, and then is placed in a home.

As I wrote earlier, it is sad that such a thing is needed, but what’s sadder is a newborn baby dying because someone abandoned it.

Hopefully, no mother with a newborn child ever feels the need to use this Safe Haven Baby Box, but if they give birth to a child that they can’t or don’t want to care for, then I am happy they have an option that will allow them to safely surrender the baby rather than doing something rash like killing it or placing it in a garbage can where it will wait to die.

I commend Corbin leaders for installing this device, which we all hope won’t be needed.

(Oh, in case anyone is wondering, no, they don’t accept teenagers…LOL.)