Humanity never fails to shock

[EnglandJoe]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6952633/

Newborn baby thrown from car in North Lauderdale, Florida.
That's just so damn wrong.

[ZokesPro]

Screwed up, people are screwed up.

[Helevitia]

You know, it's things like this that make you want to hurt people.

[KRSESQ]

Followup

Not as horrific a tale as originally thought, but a little f****d up nonetheless. The mother made up the whole story, apparently to hide the fact that she'd been pregnant from the rest of her family.
The couple arguing in the white sedan was an unfortunate coincidence.

Jon Stewart is going to have a field day with this one.

Kevin

[KRSESQ]

More info.

Kevin

[Umfriend]

She said that she decided to drive to a fire station to leave the baby -- which is legal under the Florida law.

WTF?

[az]

Umf: To prevent mothers from killing their children and to protect the children from growing up under a mother who doesn't want them. You may know the same with churches instead of fire stations.

AZ

[GT98]

Originally posted by az
Umf: To prevent mothers from killing their children and to protect the children from growing up under a mother who doesn't want them. You may know the same with churches instead of fire stations.

AZ

Excactly...they have other sites like Police stations and what not that you can leave a baby at also.

[Helevitia]

Not sure about the rest of the US, but in California, you can leave a newborn at a Hospital, Police station or Fire station no questions asked.

[Jammrock]

Same for Kansas, and I would guess most of the US. Churches work as well, though they are required to hand the child over to social services, and the parent(s) can keep their anonimity.

The main reason behind the law is for teenagers and other women who cannot financially, psychologically, and/or mentally take care of a baby and don't want to get in trouble with their parents, drop out of school, get in trouble with the law, etc. People like that had a tendancy of leaving their babies for dead somewhere, and in most cases succeeded on the dead part. Thus this "no questions asked" rule came into play.

A woman or man can drop the baby off, say, "I can't take care of him/her," hand off the child and walk away. No questions asked, no further investigation done. It keeps the parent(s) out of jail for being stupid (child neglect, infanticide, child abandonment) and puts the babies in homes where they are wanted.

So in other words, if said women had simply walked into the hospital and said, "I can't care for this baby," and walked away, this would not have even made the local news.

Jammrock

[EnglandJoe]

You know what really annoys me, slightly off topic? That they change the news and don't leave the original story. I wonder if they emply a guy called Winston to do that for them?

[Jessterw]

The only problem I have with the no questions asked policy is that it further creates an atmosphere of irresponsibility. You have sex, you should be well and ready to face the consequences. Harsh, but I see it all too often. Of course, the policy/program does prevent dumpster babies and abortions that might otherwise occur, so that good that comes from it does outweigh the bad.

[Umfriend]

Would not know, I guess any parent can give up their kid for adoption here as well, but not by just "leaving" it instead of "bringing" it somewhere. But maybe I just misunderstood and the good people at the fire station screen their premises every hour or so to check for abandoned babies.

The only problem I have with the no questions asked policy is that it further creates an atmosphere of irresponsibility. You have sex, you should be well and ready to face the consequences.

I'm not sure about this, but as I understand it, education in the US on this matter focusses on not having pre-marital sex rather heavily and sortof ignores to tell kids what to do if and when they're gonna have sex anyway. The point being that irresponsibility with respect to sex may well be a consequence of ignorance, being bred by the educational system.

But it's just my preconception about sex, the US and teenagers, willing to be proven utterly wrong on this part.

[schmosef]

When I was in grade five they split the boys and girls into separate groups and we were each shown a sex ed/puberty video and then were lead in a discussion. The boys were shown a video targeted to boys and the girls were shown a video targeted to girls.

These movies were very explicit in nature with lots of details about anatomy and physiology and attempted to answer a lot of embarrassing questions that all kids probably wonder but wouldn’t feel comfortable asking.

In grade six they decided to not split us up for the sex ed/puberty class. All of us, boys and girls, watched a video about girls and puberty. I was told by some girls in my class that it was the same video they had seen in grade five. The next day we were all supposed to watch the video for boys, but we ended up having a supply teacher that day and we didn't have sex ed. It was a couple of days before my teacher came back and when he did there was no mention of any further sex ed. I asked him why we didn't get to watch the boys video and he told he that it wasn't necessary. It was kind of a non-answer. I figured the school might have received complaints about the boys watching a video about girls (I remember the girls in my class being very embarrassed that we got to see their video. It contained A LOT of content that they'd just as soon us not know!) and decided not to push their luck.

In grade nine we had a sex ed day where we were split up by gender again. This time we got to practice rolling condoms onto bananas! And they gave us all these STD flash cards to take home. We also had a bunch of gym classes that were dedicated to sex ed. My gym teacher was very hot (some of you will remember the story I told before about her spandex shorts) and it was a lot of fun to learn about sex from her. She was always getting embarrassed. At one point she brought in a public health nurse for a few classes and she was even hotter than my teacher. Then there was the day that the two of them had us watch a sex ed video about a guy getting herpes from a really hot girl and how she'd gotten it from her previous boyfriend who cheated on her. It was one of those "when you have sex with someone, you're having sex with everyone they've ever had sex with too" type videos. Toward the end of the video there was an even hotter woman who explained the moral of the story and also told us that masturbation was a totally appropriate way to deal with our sexual desires until we got married.

I remember being perturbed with my teacher and the public health nurse because they were trying to turn sex into a shameful act and I wanted to ask them if they'd had pre-marital sex but didn't because I didn't want to get into trouble. I still had fun watching them squirm while trying to answer all the guys questions.

[Umfriend]

Yeah, but you were raised in Canada, no? I wonder about the statistics on teenage preganancies, left-alone babies, abortions and STD's in the US and Canada. With all my prejudices I'd expect the picture to be better in Canada (although by far not as good as in the Netherlands of course )