After. Part 32

Devon's mom gasps.

Dom presses her lips together. Crosses her arms. "Look, you need to think this over, Devon. Very carefully. As I said before, there's no hurry. We'll talk about it tomorrow. The pros and the cons."

"No." Devon keeps her eyes focused on Dom. She doesn't blink. Not even once. "I've already thought this over very carefully, Dom. I'm not going to change my mind. Not tomorrow. Not ever."

Dom and Devon stand like that for a long moment, each watching the other.

There's a battle going on there, behind Dom's wire frames. Devon sees Dom's lips move. She has something more she wants to say.

Dom lets her breath out slowly. And nods.

"Okay, Devon." Dom drops her arms down to her sides. "Okay. I'll work hard to get you the best deal that I can." She shrugs. "I don't know if I agree with your decision, but the decision has to be yours." She shakes her head, sighs. "Not mine."

Devon throws her head back, smiles up at the ceiling.

She's never felt so free from something in her life.

She'd won.

author's note.

The "Dumpster baby" phenomenon is an invisible American tragedy, poorly understood, and rarely acknowledged.

Though most people would consider the behavior inexplicable and unusual, its occurrence is disturbingly common. Approximately one baby is abandoned to a trash can every day in the United States, and when an American child is slain by a parent, 45 percent of those killings occur within twenty-four hours of birth.1 After conducting a study of the issue over the nine-year period between 1989 and 1998, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that "the homicide rate on the first day of life was at least 10 times greater than the rate during any other time of life."2 This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Experts believe that the vast majority of discarded babies are never found. No statistic exists for those babies. They lie in the unmarked graves of numerous munic.i.p.al garbage dumps across the country.

I first became interested in "Dumpster babies" while living in Philadelphia in the mid-nineties. My husband was a law student at the University of Pennsylvania at the time, and my third child, Arianna, was about five months old. A few days before Christmas 1995, I was listening to public radio when I learned that earlier that morning an off-duty Philadelphia police officer had found a baby in the trash. He had been out walking his pit bull when the dog started barking and straining toward a trash bag set out at the curb near a couple of garbage cans. Inside the bag, the baby was still alive. The emergency room nurses nicknamed the newborn "Baby Nick" because he was miraculously rescued in "the nick of time" during the holiday season. Given the twenty-two-degree temperature that morning, had he been discovered even fifteen minutes later, Baby Nick would've undoubtedly died. This story strongly affected me. I had three little children of my own at the time, and though money was very tight for us in those days, I couldn't fathom what desperation would lead a woman to throw away her helpless infant.

Other stories started popping up in the news after that, and I took notice: the infamous Amy Grossberg/Brian Peterson story where two young unmarried-but economically privileged-college students killed their newborn son upon his birth, and the shocking story of Melissa Drexler, whom the media dubbed "Prom Mom." The New Jersey teen gave birth in the bathroom stall during her high school prom, returning to the dance floor shortly after dumping the baby's dead body in the restroom's trash can.

Then, when I was pregnant with my fifth child and my husband was an Army prosecutor in Was.h.i.+ngton State, I truly grew intrigued with the issue. My husband was a.s.signed a "Dumpster baby" case to try. In that case, a soldier secretly gave birth in the barracks, placed the newborn in a trash bag, and tossed the bag into a Dumpster behind the barracks. Fortunately, another soldier pa.s.sing by heard a cry and discovered the baby alive. I was amazed that a soldier living within the stringent military environment could successfully conceal her pregnancy.

As my husband began to pull the case together, many interesting facts came to light. He discovered that several members of the soldier's unit, including her superior officers, had suspected she was pregnant during the last few weeks of her pregnancy, but they were afraid to approach her. They didn't want to offend her if they were mistaken, and they didn't want to intrude on the female soldier's private life.

Beginning then, I started researching the issue for myself and discovered that baby dumping has a long history. In England during the Middle Ages, neonaticide (the killing of a newborn by its parent during the first twenty-four hours of life)3 was such a problem that the Stuart b.a.s.t.a.r.d Infanticide Act of 1624 was enacted. This law mandated that any woman having concealed her pregnancy and childbirth must provide proof that the child was stillborn or be guilty of murder, often with the penalty of death. In Colonial America, lawmakers similarly pa.s.sed statutes whose aim was to punish "lewd and dissolute women" who produced "b.a.s.t.a.r.d children" but lacked enough "natural affection to keep them alive."4 By the time of the Reformation, children were being abandoned at such a high rate that governments in Northern Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal created foundling homes, often in cooperation with the Catholic Church, in order to help eradicate the problem.

Fast forwarding to contemporary times and the United States, in an attempt to alleviate the growing problem and give pregnant women a way to anonymously abandon their babies without fear of prosecution, Texas was the first state to enact what would later be termed "safe haven" legislation. That was in 1999, and since then, all forty-nine other states have pa.s.sed similar legislation. Yet news outlets all over the United States are still reporting these "Dumpster baby" stories with alarming regularity. So why is this still happening? After attempts to answer that question.

1 Kaye, Neil S. (1991). Abstract of Kaye, N., Borenstein, N., Donnelly, M.: Families, Murder, and Insanity: A Psychiatric Review of Paternal Neonaticide. Clinical Digest Series.

2 Riley, Laura. (2005). Neonaticide: A Grounded Theory Study. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Vol. 12 (4), 3.

3 Dr. Phillip Resnick, forensic psychiatrist, was the first to coin the term "neonaticide," differentiating it from infanticide and filicide in his 1970 groundbreaking study on the issue (published in his cla.s.sic article, "Murder of the newborn: A psychiatric review of neonaticide," in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 126, 1970.) 4 Schwartz, Lita Linzer, and Isser, Natalie K. (2000). Endangered Children: Neonaticide, Infanticide, and Filicide. New York: CRC Press, 36-37.

acknowledgments.

This may seem cliche, but it's nevertheless true: writing is a lot like being pregnant. First there's a conception. Then comes what feels like an endless period of development. And, finally, the birth. The hard work of labor is finally over, and everybody celebrates and gushes, "How beautiful!" and "You must be so proud!" You hold this new, exciting thing in your hands and somehow forget the pain it took to put it there.

Also, like a pregnant woman, a writer needs tons of support. After would never have entered the world had the following people not been there for me. I owe you all huge thank-yous! To Jo Anne Martin for letting me be a fly on the wall of your cla.s.sroom in Remann Hall-if only every kid could have a teacher with as big a heart as yours. To Detention Manager Gerald Murphy and Remann Hall Administrator Daniel Erker for giving me access to the girls. To Dr. Phillip Resnick, forensic psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of neonaticide, for taking the time to provide me with feedback on an early draft of my book. To Brad Poole for allowing me to pick away at your brain about Was.h.i.+ngton State juvenile defense, and to Robert C. Gottlieb for your legal expertise with cases like Devon's. To Todd Kelley for showing me around Tacoma General, and to Laird Pisto for providing answers to my legal questions relating to hospital procedure. To Dr. Rohit Katial for all the time you spent thoroughly answering my many questions, and to the rest of my medical experts-Dr. Nicki Bacon, Dr. Barbara Echo, and Nan Gilette-for your willingness to impart your knowledge. To Susan Pollock for helping me to understand how Child Protective Services handles abandoned baby cases, and to Yael Ben-Ari for providing a social worker's perspective. To Virginia Pfalzer and Joan Dedman of Safe Place for Newborns of Was.h.i.+ngton for making me smart on "safe haven" legislation. To Mark Dougherty for checking that my "soccer mom" descriptions of "the beautiful game" made sense. To Alix Reid for believing in Devon's story from the very beginning and focusing her voice. To my fab "Wild Folk" critique group for all the insightful constructive criticism and "inciteful" debate. To my agent, Amy Berkower, for firmly believing in this book and finding it the perfect home at Viking. To Regina Hayes for firmly believing in this book and offering it the perfect home at Viking. To my wonderful editor, Joy Peskin, for your incredible enthusiasm and polis.h.i.+ng rag in the form of a pen-your seemingly innocuous suggestions prompted me to work harder and stay up later than I ever thought I would. Fingers crossed, we will do it again! To Sara Gustafson, Vivian Gembara, and my little sis, Bonnie Etnyre, for reading early drafts and suggesting great improvements. To Connie K. Walle for granting me permission to use the poems that were once sandblasted into concrete on the Promenade at Point Defiance but have since washed away-at least they are commemorated here! To my mom, Elizabeth Moudry, for being a total "mom," nagging me nonstop to finish this book. To my long-suffering kids-Alix, Anastasia, Ari, Andrew, and Kat-for putting up with all those cold cereal and tuna melt/tomato soup dinners, that cluttered kitchen table, and often all-over-the-map ADD mom. This seven-year project was always present and demanding of my time and attention, almost like another sibling. To G.o.d through Whom all inspiration is given. And, of course, to Andy-words are inadequate to express my grat.i.tude.

end.