By Alyssa Williams
Her story isn't new. In fact, it's a storyline that, tragically, our hearts grow weary of hearing.
Teri was 18 and pregnant. She hid her growing belly, but her secret could only keep for so long. The thing had to come out some time.
It's a girl. But, the baby's boisterous cries met an untimely end in suffocating plastic. She had only 10 minutes in this world before moving on to the next.
Teri's story swept news segments across the nation in September of this year. The sophomore volleyball player at Mercyhurst College, a private, Catholic liberal arts school in Eerie, Pa., will be charged with murder.
Why, we ask, did Teri feel suffocating her baby was the only alternative she had? Lost in the controversial debate between abortion and adoption, there is one more option not often considered. An option that needs more publicity and more support. That option is Safe Haven.
If more resources were available to Teri, perhaps she would have known "Safe Haven" laws, held in 48 states, including Pennsylvania, do not criminally prosecute the abandonment of unharmed newborns to places like hospitals, firehouses, or police stations.
The legislation, initiated in 1999, gives desperate mothers an opportunity to hand their babies over to institutions that would protect and provide medical care to the children who then become wards of the state. Mothers, fathers, or legal guardians would remain anonymous and shielded from prosecution.
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in 2002 featured on the Center for Disease Control Web site stated that the homicide rate on the first day of life was more than ten times greater than the homicide rate during any other time of life.
College and universities need to offer more information to students like Teri to help decrease these rates of murder. Teri could have known about the Child Welfare Information Gateway Web site. On that site she would she could have discovered that Pennsylvania law decrees that parents may relinquish a child up to 28 days old to hospitals and heath care providers. The parents are not criminally liable for the action.
The Safe Place for Newborns Web site would have directed her to six different hospitals in the Eerie area where she could have placed her little girl. Murder would not have been an option for Teri. Her baby would be alive and Teri could finish college.
Although difficult to accurately track, UC Irvine professor Richard McKenzie estimated in 2001 that almost 22,000 babies are abandoned each year in the hospitals where they were born.
If Mercyhurst is anything like Portland's own private Catholic liberal arts college, the University of Portland, there will be numerous pamphlets in the health center about abstinence (eight, to be exact) and none concerning the more complicated issue of actually being pregnant.
Safe Haven laws support Catholic tenets and conservative support for the "right to life" movement and yet give mothers one more choice. Colleges and universities are obligated to distribute information about this life-saving legislation for the good of its students.
The National Conference of State Legislatures questioned the solvency of Safe Haven laws in 2003, arguing that they undermine effective child welfare and adoption policy. Critics claim that the laws promote women to hide their pregnancies, give birth unsafely, and disregard established methods of adoption that provide children with their genealogical and medical history.
However, Tom Atwood, of the National Council for Adoption, asks in defiance of the negative evaluations, "Just how many babies do these laws have to rescue from death in a dumpster in order to be worthwhile?"
The answer is just one: Teri Rhodes's daughter.
Alyssa Williams is a senior communication major
