Nebraska has been in the news lately for having a baby safe haven law that technically includes anyone under 18; therefore parents are abaondoning their kids.
What pisses me off is that there are people who are saying that the law should be changed because parents shouldn't abandon their kids.
Umm... OK, yes, by all means, keep those families together. The types of parents who would abandon their kids as soon as it became legal to do so deserve to be punished by being forced to keep the kids. I see no problem whatsoever with 'the best interest of the child' in that logic whatsoever.
And that really seems to be the logic, too. Believe me, I know that the foster care/temporary care system in the U.S. isn't perfect (read: horribly, horribly, horribly flawed), but I also feel that it's better to be in it than to be in an unsafe home. What is especially upsetting to policymakers is that this is bringing just how badly the system fails kids into light. I mean, sure, if you're not in a place to parent your kids, you know it, and you want what's best for them, you COULD seek out-of-home placement for your kids in a U.S. state outside of Massachusetts- if you gave them a black eye or starved them, or otherwise created an obvious, unambiguous, and unignorable problem. Other than that, you have to be really fuckin' savvy, really fuckin' lucky, or you're really fuckin' fucked.
I will admit I picked a particularly retardedly written article to illustrate the stupidest points that make me the angriest (ex: "Abandonment scars older children for the rest of their lives, he says, because they think it's their fault"- well, uh, I think the kids in question would
probably know something was fucked up in their life if they stayed, too, you dumb asshole) and it seems like more and more articles at least touch on the idea that maybe these kids would be safer elsewhere.