SACRAMENTO — In 1996, Debi Faris voluntarily embarked on the joyless task of recovering the bodies of "trash can" babies from county coroners, wrapping the abandoned infants in snug afghans and burying them in tiny coffins at her private Garden of Angels cemetery.
But as she prepared this month for funerals No. 42 and 43, Faris said, her "mission of heart" had become so heavy that it was time for the Legislature to put her out of business. "That is my . . . goal," she said.
She wants California to create a "safe place" at hospital emergency rooms where desperate, unprepared mothers can surrender their babies--no questions asked--rather than toss newborns into dumpsters, ditches, landfills and other hostile sites.
"It is the hardest thing in the world to put a beautiful, healthy child into the ground. . . . We want them to be given the opportunity to live," Faris said.
For nearly four years, Faris' carefully tended miniature cemetery near the San Bernardino Mountains at Calimesa has been filling with bodies recovered from coroners in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
Faris, a Yucaipa mother of three, said she is committed to providing her emotionally exhausting service indefinitely but is convinced that babies destined for abandonment deserve a better chance.
She persuaded state Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga) to introduce a bill to shield the mothers from prosecution if they hand over their infants in good condition to emergency room employees.
At the hospital, the newborns would be cared for until they could be transferred to Child Protective Services or other welfare agencies. The bill, SB 1368, would apply to babies up to 72 hours old and allow mothers who changed their minds to reclaim them.
"Our message to young mothers is that guilt, shame or panic are not reasons to destroy a newborn's chance at life," Brulte said.
The bill, based on a pioneering Texas law signed by Gov. George W. Bush last year, is scheduled for its first Senate committee hearing Tuesday. A similar bill, AB 1764, by Assemblyman Ken Maddox (R-Garden Grove) is advancing in the Assembly.
The Texas statute was a response to a series of cases in the Houston area, where 13 babies were found abandoned in the first 10 months of 1999, three of them dead. There was rising national concern over what appeared to be a worsening problem, highlighted by two shocking cases in the East.
