That piece in the Times yesterday was on my mind. And this morning, as I was weaving through city traffic on my way back to the parish from the barber shop, the police medic named in the story, Tim Jaccard was interviewed on one of those talk radio programs.
He found his first baby in a toilet in the ladies' room at the Nassau County Courthouse back in 1997, while over 400 people milled around the courthouse interior. Others were found in recycling bins, another dug up by a dog in someone's backyard, others discarded in the ingenious nooks and crannies of urban squalor. Last week's was by far the most horrifying: wrapped in plastic and left in the street, the baby had been run over at least twice by the time a man walking his dog took a look and saw her two legs.Jaccard started a foundation, Children of Hope, and got a bill passed: the Infant Abandonment Protection Act. A woman can give up her baby within five days of birth at a police station, church, hospital, etc. - no questions asked. The adoption rate of babies given up this way is apparently quite high.
On a later segment of this talk show, a rep from Planned Parenthood lavishly extolled Jaccard's work and concluded, "This is why protecting women's abortion rights is of such vital importance. Without the abortion option, many women will feel forced to take the lives of their own babies in the horrible ways we've been hearing of."
Hmmm.... I seem to have missed something here.
Only in America.
