According to the Daily News, a newborn baby girl was found inside of a shoebox , abandoned in a Long Island apartment building. The shoebox had holes in it so that the infant could breathe, and she was dressed in a striped onsie to keep her warm. Police speculate that she was placed where she would be found quickly by whoever left her.Â
Allow me to hop right up on my soapbox. When I see news like this, it makes me so angry because there’s a part of me that assumes the mother had no access to free or low-cost proper contraception or, even more important, ant basic information about it. Do I know this for a fact? No, I do not. Do I see this kind of malarkey still going on in our country? Yes, even though the Obama administration has begun to disable the totally useless ‘abstinence-only’ education programs that Bush and his anti-choice cronies insisted on wasting our tax dollars on.  Â
It makes me wonder if the abandoned infant’s Mom knew she had a choice…a choice to prevent a pregnancy she obviously could not handle (or, to be fair as again I am simply speculating, did not want to handle). And let’s also include the infant’s Dad, who could very well have also not received the type of counseling that would have allowed him to know to simply use a condom. Â
This is a muddy argument on my part, I know that. Frankly, I don’t know if the parents are teenagers who went to schools where upfront, useful information about reproduction and sexuality were offered. They very well could be people from another country who immigrated to the US and couldn’t acquire or afford health care that could have kept this unwanted pregnancy from happening. Regardless of how this particular sad incident took place, or my attempts to play Jessica Fletcher on the reason why, I do know this: there are so many roadblocks out there today to keep young women (and men) ignorant of the ways in which we can all be safe and responsible about sex. And when that is the norm, we see things like this pop up on CNN. That’s just not OK.Â
