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...three more kids were abandoned at Omaha hospitals, bringing the total to 34 since mid-September, shortly after the law was passed. A 5-year-old boy was left by his mother on Thursday night; two teenage girls, 14 and 17, were dropped off earlier the same day. The older girl ran away from the ER before authorities could arrive. And a Florida man traveled from Miami to drop off his 11-year-old boy earlier this week. (See Pictures of the Week...
Five of the children abandoned in Nebraska have been from out of state, but most are local. A majority of the children are older than 13 and have a history of being treated for mental-health issues. Nearly every abandoned child came from a single-parent household. In September, one father walked into a hospital and left nine children, ages 1 to 17. He reportedly told hospital workers that he'd been overwhelmed since his wife died a few days after their youngest was born...
...phone calls from desperate parents, she said. Landry argued that the state offers many lifelines and that services are available. "So all a parent has to do is call a hotline?" Senator Steve Lathrop asked skeptically. "What is the harm," he asked repeatedly, of allowing distraught parents to bring older kids...
...promise," one child begged as the mother walked away, Ann Schaumacher of Immanuel Medical Center in Omaha told the judiciary committee. "It is not the right place for relinquishment to occur," she said of the ER abandonments. Some hardened adolescents show no emotion at all, she recalled, citing an older teen who was left by a mother who simply said, "I can't do it anymore." Said Schaumacher: "These children will never be the same, and that's the tragedy of this law." Schaumacher, like most hospital representatives, argues that the law should be limited to newborns and infants...
Lawmakers sympathetic to the parents and guardians of older troubled children note that Omaha is, after all, home to the original Boys Town of Father Flanagan fame. In the city, there's a statue of one young boy carrying another on his back, with the words chiseled underneath, "He ain't heavy, Father, he's m' brother." During the Great Depression, parents would scrape together bus fare and hang a sign that read "Take Me to Boys Town" around their child's neck. Tysheema Brown, the Atlanta woman who drove 1,000 miles to Omaha to drop...