What Makes A Good Family?

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on November 17

I’m sure many of you have read with horror the stories about the children that have been abandoned in Nebraska under the state’s safe haven law. In July the state legislature, following the lead of most other states, passed a law stating that parents would not be prosecuted if they abandoned their children at a hospital or other safe haven in Nebraska. They made one crucial omission, however. Safe haven laws are meant to encourage parents of newborns to safely give up the babies they feel they cannot care for; the Nebraska law, however, only said “child”, with no age limit. Since then 34 children have been abandoned in Nebraska, half of them teenagers—the most recent abandonment was a five year old boy, on Nov. 13. Parents have driven from as far as Georgia and Florida to drop off their children. A father of nine who said his wife had recently died left all of them at a Nebraska hospital. And since the Governor announced a few weeks ago that the legislature would amend the law to close the age loophole, the pace of abandonment has tripled.

What kind of parents would do this? Desperate ones, of course, but in many cases truly lousy ones. The kind of parents who should never have had kids in the first place, but of course there is no way to control that. By contrast, as an adoptive parent I had to jump through hoops and put up with invasion of privacy that the parents of these abandoned children would never have stood for, I’m sure. There was a three-hour initial interview, two home studies, a police and FBI check and endless, endless forms. It was 18 months before the process was complete and I was allowed to bring home my daughter.

The tragedy for the children abandoned in Nebraska is that there are many, many families desperate to adopt but put off by the red tape, the cost, and worst of all, the restrictions. And yet, adoptive parents have formed some of the happiest families I know, perhaps because this was no accidental decision. For example, I know of a couple with two wonderful adopted boys. They are raising them with love, discipline and an extended family to embrace them (one set of grandparents even lives next door). They are in a long, committed relationship, they are active in the PTA, expose their kids to cultural and educational opportunities that most of us are far too lazy to avail ourselves of, and have loads of friends in the community, all with kids of their own. Yet in Utah, Mississippi, Florida and now, Arkansas, they would not be allowed to adopt because they are gay men. What’s wrong with this picture?

In fact, the Arkansas law bans adoption by any unmarried person, gay or straight. Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe lamented passage of the law in the recent election because of the shortage of foster parents in the state, and the Nebraska experience surely backs him up on that point. The law was passed on the strength of votes by evangelical Christians. Hopefully they are all stepping up now and adopting or fostering these children to ensure that they are raised in the heterosexual, two-parent (married of course) homes that they feel are the only environment where children can thrive.

I’m biased, of course, because I’m a single mother. My daughter is doing just fine despite the lack of a two-parent family. I wonder if the same could be said of many of those abandoned children in Nebraska. Rev. Steven Boes, president of Boys Town — the original safe haven of Father Flanagan fame, and headquartered in Omaha—told Time magazine that the parents who are leaving kids shouldn’t be demonized:

Father Flanagan said it: he learned there was no such thing as a bad boy. And I have come to believe there is no such thing as a bad family.” There is a 12-year-old girl at Boys Town now, he says, who desperately wants to see her mother, the same mother who broke the girl’s arm and used to hold her down and burn her with cigarettes. “Why, I wonder? But if she can see something good there, surely there is good in all families.

Yes, good in all families. Anyone who looks askance at same-sex parents should remember that before judging.

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