It started out like all the stories of its kind that we New Yorkers get used to, so sad and cold, it hurts your bones:
August 29, 2000
A newborn boy was found abandoned on a subway platform at 14th Street in Manhattan last night, the police said.
A subway passenger found the baby on the southbound platform of the A, C and E trains, which run along Eighth Avenue, around 8:30 p.m., the police said.
”I glanced down and saw what I thought was just a baby doll,” the passenger, Danny Stewart, told Channel 11 News. ”His upper body and his head were wrapped in a dark sweatshirt. But as I started to go up the stairs, he started to move, so I knew he was alive.”
Mr. Stewart called 911 from a pay phone, then ran back to the platform to baby-sit until the police came and took the boy to St. Vincents Hospital and Medical Center, the police said.
The boy is in good health, said John Re, an administrator at the hospital. Doctors believe he was probably born yesterday, Mr. Re said.
But then……twelve years later.
Categories: Childhood, Fatherhood, Marriage
I’m glad it worked out. Apparently the whole adoption process designed to protect children can and should be overcome by a hunch. But since it did work out, nice that the parents are creative enough to celebrate the story!
I’m a little leery of passages like “hurts your bones” and the like. Clearly it didn’t hurt the person who mattered the most at one crucial moment enough: the one(s) who threw the child away.
A few hours or perhaps even minutes later and this child would likely have ended up like Melissa Drexler’s baby. He could even have ended up like another “Jonathan Foundling.”
It still boggles my mind as to how many people are fertile when they can’t, or won’t properly handle the consequences. Oh well, there’s always William Goldman’s quote: “Life isn’t fair; it’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
In before someone claims that the author and his husband aren’t their son’s parents… :-/
this is what adoption should be about
@maggie, where does the article suggest that the normal adoption process was circumvented? The “hunch” was a feeling that these men might want to be parents to this baby. Nowhere does it say that they did not have to go through the same steps that any couple wanting to adopt an abandoned baby went through.
Of course you see no difference, Hector. When a person doesn’t see women as full autonomous human beings, it’s easy to overlook the tiny little detail that a fetus is typically inside a woman’s body and a newborn baby is not.
Hector_St_Clare,
Plenty of “morally serious people” have found the question of bodily integrity and the limits to which we can invade someone else’s physical self without their consent to be a topic worth discussing. The bodily integrity of pregnant women is an issue about which many serious discussions have been had, across the political, philosophical, and legal spectrum. There is a great body of legal precedent that wrestles with questions concerning the extent to which women do and should have the right to make decisions about their bodies when they are pregnant and/or giving birth.
To dismiss these discussions as “trivial,” and simply as a matter of “location,” renders your own arguments weak because they fail to engage with your critics in any substantive way. You clearly believe you already have a satisfactory answer and aren’t responding to fannie’s observation in a way that invites further mutual exchange.
Perhaps you don’t care about engaging in serious conversations about feminism thought and political activism; so be it. But in that case I’m continually puzzled as to why you bother to try and discuss these issues with people like fannie and myself, when you don’t seem interested in actually debating with us and exploring our different viewpoints in any respectful, substantive way.
Attempted infanticide? This was abandonment, not murder; somebody left the baby wrapped in a sweatshirt on a subway platform, not thrown on the tracks or left in the open air to die.
By all means, let’s wring our hands about whatever it was that drove the baby’s parents to leave him on a subway for strangers to find. Let’s not, however, waste time feeding Hector’s need to pick stupid arguments with ‘the feminist mindset’.
Mythago,
In a broader sense, I don’t see how this detracts from my point that it is logically inconsistent to be so concerned about babies after they’re born, but not before.
Anna J Cook,
Well, I’m primarily making arguments on the moral plane, and about what our laws ought to be. I’m less concerned with what current legal precedents say, since (clearly) abortion is legal today, and I’d like to change that.
I’d be happy to have a moral argument with you though, about abortion and infanticide. I’d be particularly interested in hearing why you think the fact of location (whether the child is inside the womb or outside) is so relevant to its moral status. Those distinctions may be important to you, but they honestly don’t seem particularly important or morally meaningful to me.
@Hector: The story is not about the horrors of child abandonment or infanticide; it is a wonderful story about becoming a parent, and has nothing to do with the reader’s views on abortion policy. Your ‘point’ is that you’re apparently bored and would rather pull the girls’ pigtails, rhetorically speaking.
@Fifth Season: While child abandonment is terrible, we don’t know what happened here or what the birth parents’ circumstances were. We do know that they bothered to try and wrap the baby in something to keep him warm and left him somewhere reasonably safe where he would likely be found (as opposed to throwing him in a Dumpster, say).
I believe there’s a policy against debating abortion for the website. Probably to keep us from pulling each other to bits.
The abandonment of the baby was a terrible thing, but on the other hand, it is wonderful that the baby was found by the kind of good man who will stop and do something about it. This is the kind of story that makes me personally thank God.
I’m not a moderator, so can’t delete any comments (except to end the thread, which I will, if need be).
If I had a hidden agenda in posting this story, it was really just that ideals about parenting are just that, ideals. The real world unfolds deeper, messier, and in some ways, more beautifully, than ideals would have it.
Also, as Diane said, I believe that we have a blog-wide commitment to steer clear of debates about abortion. So I ask commenters to respect that.
Hello, all. A couple of comments about abortion have been deleted, as violations of our civility policy. Hector and everyone: please read the policy and try to comply with it.
There are no topics that are off-limits here; but we ask that commenters please try to stick with the topic of the post, rather than use it as a launching pad for other, related topics; and especially when touching on difficult issues, please do your best not to come across as glib or generally accusatory.
Was the whole thing a set up, where he arranged to be at the station when the new mother was going to “abandon” her baby? Did he already know the judge? It seems that at the very first hearing, three months after the miraculously found infant had been placed in state foster care (those first few months are probably hard, better suited for experienced women to do), the judge gave the baby to Kevin without knowing anything about him. Kevin was only there to give an account of finding the infant: “I thought I saw a doll by the turnstiles, but it moved! It was a baby! It was in a black sweatshirt! I called 911, then my boyfriend, then the police came! It was amazing!” Did the Judge really need him to be there to give this account again? No, so was he only there because he knew the judge was going to bypass the normal procedures and “bark out orders” to award him the baby on the spot? And then after two more months (to get the apartment ready) he takes custody, that’s remarkably fast for an adoption, isn’t it? The whole thing seems fishy to me.
Manny, that’s paranoid bordering on the ridiculous. And the idea that only an “experienced woman” ought to deal with a newborn is an insult to devoted fathers everywhere.
I totally respect fathers and mothers who care for a brand new baby. I sure wouldn’t want to have to deal with one, I know how it smells and how little sleep they get. Babies don’t remember much from those days anyway, so my preference would be for an experienced woman to take care of it for the first five or six months, and then take custody. And have the state pay for all those diapers, so I can spend more on a nice stroller and paint the nursery. I don’t think I’m wrong to expect that the foster care provider is probably a woman, either. I do think it is probably better for the kid’s comfort and development, and also think women are probably better at it, but that wasn’t the point I was making when I said that, I was alluding to the way gay men exploit and objectify women to make their families all the time, similar to the way lesbians think of sperm donors.
Sorry, the guy that found the baby is named Danny, not Kevin, sorry Kevin!
Manny,
Fortunately for same sex families and their kids, I’d wager big money that your language only creates more empathy and support for us. So, a heartfelt thank you.
On that note, I’m going to end this thread, as it appears we’ve exhausted what’s here.