Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2006 Infant Safe Haven Laws: Legislating in the Culture of Life Carol Sanger Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Family Law Commons, Health Law and Policy Commons, Law and Politics Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation Carol Sanger, Infant Safe Haven Laws: Legislating in the Culture of Life, COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW, VOL. 106, P. 753, 2006 (2006). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1413 This Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. \\server05\productn\C\COL\106-4\COL401.txt unknown Seq: 1 2-MAY-06 10:50 COLUMBIA LAW REVIEW VOL. 106 MAY 2006 NO. 4 ARTICLES INFANT SAFE HAVEN LAWS: LEGISLATING IN THE CULTURE OF LIFE Carol Sanger * This Article analyzes the politics, implementation, and influence of In- fant Safe Haven laws. These laws, enacted across the states in the early 2000s in response to much-publicized discoveries of dead and abandoned infants, provide for the legal abandonment of newborns. They offer new mothers immunity and anonymity in exchange for leaving their babies at designated Safe Havens. Yet despite widespread enactment, the laws have had relatively little impact on the phenomenon of infant abandonment. This Article explains why this is so, focusing particularly on a disconnect between the legislative scheme and the characteristics of neonaticidal mothers that makes the use of Safe Havens less likely.