Parents' despair is left at Nebraska's doorstep

Reporting from Lincoln, Neb. — First Melyssa Cowburn's 5-year-old child tried to bash in a baby's head with a hammer. Then he set the shower curtain on fire. The next day he plugged all the sinks and toilets in their apartment and flooded the place.

Cowburn and her husband had tried unsuccessfully to get their insurance company to pay for mental health treatment for the boy. The difficulty she had keeping him under control had already helped drive her to attempt suicide last year. Now she felt she had only one option: She flew with her child to Nebraska last week and tearfully left him there.

This state has become notorious for being the one place in the country with a law whose wording allows parents to abandon children up to age 18. Its unique safe-haven law -- which was intended to let parents leave unwanted infants at hospitals without legal consequences -- took effect in September, and since then 35 children have been abandoned, almost all of them 11 or older.

The Nebraska Legislature has spent this week in a special session, frantically trying to revise the law. It is expected to be amended today to allow abandonment only of infants up to 30 days old.

But children's advocates as well as parents like Cowburn say the state has done nothing to address the problem exposed by the safe-haven law: desperate families quietly struggling to raise mentally ill children with little help from the government. "There are parents like me who really need help," Cowburn said. "I don't know how to help him. I don't know what else to do."

Nebraska's unicameral Legislature has vowed to address the problem when it meets for its regular session in January. On Thursday, it created a special committee to formulate proposals during the next two months.

"It has been a blessing in disguise," state Sen. Amanda McGill, who chairs the committee, said of the response to the safe-haven law. "It has brought to light a serious problem."

"These parents were at wit's end," McGill said. "People don't want to give up their kids. They just want to get them help."

The administration of Republican Gov. Dave Heineman, which faces a potential budget deficit next year, has been cool to the suggestion that the flood of abandoned children shows a need to patch holes in the state's safety net. Todd Landry, head of the state's child welfare agency, said 75% of the Nebraska children were receiving some type of assistance from the government.