I had just arrived at the television news bureau in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where I was bureau chief, when a police sergeant I knew called with a tip. A man collecting aluminum cans from dumpsters nearby had found what he thought was a doll. Looking closer, he realized it was the body of an infant.
"You need to get over here," he said. An officer was stretching crime scene tape across the gravel alley when we arrived. Detectives stood around a yellow dumpster and a funeral home van waited at the end of the block.
I watched a detective climb into the dumpster and hand a small bundle wrapped in towels to a man who placed it in the van and drove off. I had covered countless difficult stories by then. Standing behind that tape, I stopped thinking about my live shot.
Who could feel so desperate that this seemed like the only option? My husband and I, married seven years, had been trying for a baby and had just been told we would never conceive. In the days that followed we learned that an 18-year-old woman who had hidden her pregnancy from her father and brother had delivered the baby alone in the family bathroom and left him in the dumpster.
An autopsy suggested he had never taken a breath. A few days later I interviewed the young woman's father. He mentioned something I had never heard of, a baby “safe haven” law, which allows parents to safely and legally relinquish newborn babies.
He wondered whether things might have gone differently if his daughter had known she could surrender her baby safely at the fire station blocks away. I remember thinking, Idaho needs that law, and I knew someone I could call. I contacted Idaho State Senator Bart Davis, whom I had interviewed many times.
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