Transcript

Pamela Town was placed for adoption as an infant

Monica Kelsey: What I was told growing up was that my birth parents were young and loving, couldn't care for me, so they placed me for adoption. That wasn't the case at all. now I'm literally on the front lines of a movement as one of these kids that wasn't lovingly and legally and anonymously placed in the Safe haven baby box. 911, where is your emergency?

Speaker B: We just found the baby in the trash.

Monica Kelsey: Is it breathing?

Speaker B: Yes, ma'. Am. He still got his umbilical cord. God, in his wisdom, chose to create man in his image. So you've got kind of the picture there of the value that God places on human life.

Monica Kelsey: Is the Safe Haven law ideal? No. Is unwanted pregnancies ideal? No. I still have firefighters that ask me, why are you going around this country spending thousands and thousands of dollars? We're trying to give these parents a safe place to fall.

All God asks of you is faithfulness.

Then conquer we must for our cause it is just. And this be our motto in God is our trust.

We need desperately to have men and women of courage and discipline, for courage

Monica Kelsey: and discipline are contagious. After high school, I joined the United States military, spent eight years defending my country, and then joined the fire service. When I got out of that and married the love of my life and, started a family. We're just ordinary people that, live in a community, that's very small, and we appreciate living here. Prior to starting Safe Haven baby boxes, I was a firefighter and a medic out of the fire station down here in Woodburn, and a medic for Traw and Fort Wayne. And, I loved it. Absolutely, loved it. What I was told growing up was that my birth parents were young and love and couldn't care for me, so they placed me for adoption. And so my whole life, you know, growing up, I thought that I had this fairytale family waiting for me when I turned 18, and my birth records would be opened. And that wasn't the case at all. When I found my biological mother, I was 37 years old, and I didn't know any of the story until I met her. My birth mom was 17 years old. She was brutally attacked and raped and left along the side of the road. But she pressed charges against a man that had raped her, and he was arrested, and he was charged. And then, if that wasn't the worst of it, that's when she finds out she's pregnant. she was hidden for the remainder of the pregnancy and then gave birth in April of 1973 and abandoned, her child two hours after that child was born. And that child was me. You know, I was whisked into this world by violence and then abandoned as an infant. And, you know, if there was a picture of an unwanted child, I think my photo would be there. And so it took me about six months of struggling, to learn her story and hear everything that she told me. I actually started getting away from my faith on that journey, and I realized that I had to turn back to my faith to find my purpose. It's interesting, too, because talking in churches now is where I get the most passionate. Because growing up, I, was one of those people that said, I'm pro life, except in the cases of rape and incest. I was that person. And now I was kind of, like, sitting back. M not accepting that at all. Like, sitting back, thinking, I have just become a hypocrite to who I am. And so I really did go back to my faith and I started reading scripture. And, you know, we're fearfully and wonderfully made. We're knit in our mother's wounds, and we're made in the image of God. And that's just not talking about your life. That's talking about my life, too. This is what hit me the hardest, was Genesis 50:20. You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done. The saving of many lives. And when I grasp that and I started really reading, I started putting my life into perspective and turning back to my faith, literally, is what birthed safe haven baby boxes. I was actually on a speaking tour in Cape Town, South Africa, with Pam Stenzel. We happened to be at the one church that has a baby safe. No other church has had this. Just this church. And so as I'm walking in, I look at this box, and I'm like, what is this? And what is it used for? And I was asking the person that was escorting us around, and they said, well, women come here at night when they don't want their child. They place their child in this box, and then somebody from the church adopts it. And I'm like, does this really work? Like, is this. Is this something that's really, really working? And they had saved seven babies that year. And I was. I just couldn't grab. I couldn't wrap my head around it because I knew. I knew we had a safe haven law in America, you know, where a woman could walk in and hand a child to a person in a fire station or hospital if they didn't want the infant or couldn't care for the infant. But I'd never seen anything like this before, and I couldn't get it out of my head. I just, you know, when Christ puts you in a position, it's kind of like an aha moment. It's like, oh, my gosh, maybe this is what I was meant to do my entire life, you know? And so, on the flight back from Cape Town, South Africa, on a delta napkin, I hand drew my version of a baby box and then brought it back to America and started the uphill battle of implementing a program that had never been done in America before. You know, when I first started Safe Haven Baby Boxes, I did not realize how bad it was. I think I was naive to think that, well, yeah, you know, Indiana was having two abandoned babies a year. So I was like, okay, well, let's just save those two babies a year that we're, you know, that we're having dumped in our state. And that's doable. But the more I started researching it, the more I started seeing that we're finding a baby every three days in America right now. And they say for every baby we find, there's two that we don't. That's a lot of infants. Nine, one one. Where is your.

We just found a baby in the trash.

Is it breathing?

Yes, ma'.

Am.

He still got his umbilical cord.

In the last 20 months, three babies have been found either dead or alive in a dumpster or hospital bathroom.

Police need information in the death of a newborn baby girl. The baby was found dead in a gas station bathroom in June of 2019.

Deputies found a crying newborn baby inside a plastic bag abandoned in a wood area in Forsyth County.

So two women out for a walk find a newborn baby buried alive.

Monica Kelsey: First came the cries from this trash can. Then came the frantic police search for whoever abandoned this newborn. I still have firefighters that ask me, why are you going around this country spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a program that's already in place? And the answer to that is simple. If we've had a program in place for the last 22 years, then why are we finding a baby every three days in America? You know, January of last year in Chicago, there was a baby found deceased in a duffel bag at the door of a firehouse in downtown Chicago. And this baby was frozen to death when it was found, and it was wrapped in a blanket in a duffel bag. So why would a mother walk all the way to a fire station with a dead Infant and leave it at the door of a fire station. She wouldn't. That baby was alive when it got there. This mother wanted this baby found, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, she didn't feel comfortable walking in. And so she laid the baby at the door, hoping that someone would walk out that door or walk in that door and find that infant, and nobody did. If they had a baby box at that firehouse in Chicago, we'd be talking about a different thing right now. We absolutely would. This little boy would have been alive. And so that's why we need to take another step. Now. Is this ideal? No. Is the Safe Haven law ideal? No. Is unwanted pregnancies ideal? No. But we deal with what we have and the culture that we're dealing. Dealing with.

Les Wriley: I'm Les Wriley. I'm the founder and president of Personhood, Mississippi. board member of the Personhood Alliance. Former president of the Personhood Alliance. God, in his wisdom, chose to create man in his image, the imago dei. And then the flip side of that, when God chose to redeem mankind, the means he used was Christ becoming a man, becoming an embryo. So you've got kind of the picture there's of the value that God places on human life. Our culture, however, does not value life. Our bodies are lives.

Monica Kelsey: Our right to decide the unborn, person, doesn't have constitutional rights.

Les Wriley: And that's why we see mothers abandoning their newborn babies because they're considered nothing more than an inconvenience. As Christians, it's our job to minister to those mothers in need. And that's exactly what Monica Kelsey is doing. She's fulfilling a desperate need in our society with the baby boxes.

Monica Kelsey: Well, I think I've always been on the front lines of something. You know, being in the military, you're on the front lines being a firefighter and Medicare on the front lines. And now I'm literally on the front lines of a movement, as one of these kids that wasn't lovingly and legally and anonymously placed in the Safe Haven baby box. And I look today as not only am I helping the infants, but I'm also helping their parents, their moms, who some of them feel like they have no other options. And if I can just give them just, an option that can bring them peace. Because if a box isn't there and a mother won't walk into a fire station or a hospital, the only alternative is an unsafe place. And so we're trying to give these parents a safe place to fall. Safe haven Baby boxes are manufactured out of our, building here in Woodburn, Indiana. We cut the plastic, we deburr the plastic, we weld the plastic together, and then it goes to our engineer where it is wired up, and, then it goes to final inspection, and then it gets shipped out to a facility somewhere in America. One of the biggest hurdles, I think, is the production time. we won't put these down in an assembly line. I believe that one person that believes in the ministry that loves what we're doing will put much more detail and time into a box than somebody that's just doing it for a paycheck. We've hired two more full timers this year to try and keep up with demand, and we're still behind. We're constantly upgrading, constantly changing the boxes to be more advanced. You know, if something else on the market comes up that's better, we're going to change, change it. We're not going to just because it's cheaper to do this way, we're going to change it. we do not buy parts from China. It's just something that we, we decided a long time ago. We're going to make sure that the parts that we have that are, that are working in these boxes are the best on the market in America. We also partnered with Underwriters Laboratory to get this box ul listed. You know, just to have Underwriters Laboratory look at our box was $38,000. But it's important, though, because we want them to make sure that everything that we're doing is safe. This box has to work 100%, 100% of the time. And we want just one more step of security. And the next step, literally is a safety company putting their stamp on our boxes. And so that's very important to us as well. A woman just has to walk up to one of our Safe Haven baby boxes, open the door, place her unharmed newborn inside, shut the door, and walk away. When a parent walks up to one of our Safe Haven baby boxes, the orange bag falls out. And that orange bag has resources for the parent in it. One of the main things that we want her to have is what to look for after giving birth. And then the second thing is a Safe Haven registry. Your ethnicity is who you are. And if a parent wants to give ethnicity or medical information to a child that they've surrendered anonymously, how are they gonna do that? And so we've made the Safe Haven registry available to them so they can mail in information later if they so choose. There's also the law inside the orange bag. So each state is different, and the orange bag is catered to that state. So the law is in that bag so that this mother can. Or this father can know that they followed the law. The last thing is a brochure on trafficking. Trafficking is a huge problem in our country right now. And so if a mother is being trafficked, we want to get the brochure, the national, brochure for trafficking in the hands of these parents just in case they need that resource. From the inside, you can see babies being placed inside the medical bassinet that has a heating unit inside. It's alarm activated. First responders are notified. Now, she's not going to hear any alarms. Everything is silent to her. But the Box is calling 911, and911 then will dispatch the fire department. that's either, in the station or if they're out on a run. If they're out on a run, the next closest station will come. And if they're in the firehouse, they'll just come to the box, pull the baby from the box, do immediate medical care, and then transport to the closest facility for medical evaluation. The longest time a baby's ever been in our box is 4 minutes and 20 seconds. and they were actually out on a fire, when that baby came into their baby box, and they sent somebody back from the fire to retrieve the infant. And it took about 4 minutes and 20 seconds for that process to happen. But our protocol is five minutes. That baby has to be out of that box within five minutes. And, we've never missed that yet. Our babies in Indiana now are being placed with their adoptive families immediately after surrender. We've never had that done before. And it's just a beautiful thing that we got to witness this week, of a baby that was placed in a box, and literally less than 10 hours later, this baby was with her new family. It's incredible. I train every, first responder. We do safe haven training in addition to the baby box training. Who can surrender a child to you can dad. Does it have to be mom? It says parent. Do we really know who the parent would be?

I'd say if somebody's bringing a child up and they're surrendering a child, I'm gonna take it, and they can sort that out later.

Monica Kelsey: That's exactly right. Taking a baby from a mom is uncomfortable. And so when we go in, we do training on safe haven, you know, and how to respect a mom's wishes, how to talk to her, what you should ask, what you shouldn't ask because a mother could still walk into that firehouse even with a box in the wall to surrender her infant. And they need to be equipped to handle that. The hotline is the workhorse of our organization. The women who call us get all of their options and then they choose what's best for them. And that's critical. You know, when somebody else isn't driving the bus for them, they have to make this decision for themselves. We've had a total inside the boxes of 35 and 133 handoffs. We're pretty happy with those numbers. We're helping women and saving babies.

Les Wriley: All throughout the scripture you see a linking between love for God and love for the weak, the helpless. You know, first John says, how can you say you love God? Who have you not seen when you don't love your neighbor? Who you have seen? We also see in scripture that when we do take a stand for what God cares about, we will face pushback. 2nd Timothy 3:12 says, Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

Monica Kelsey: So one of the biggest misconceptions that is out there is people claim that, somebody could throw a bomb in one of our boxes.

If a terrorist was to coordinate an effort and place a pipe bomb inside the box like this one, it would be able to devastate the emergency rooms, killing your first responders.

Monica Kelsey: Not once in the history of baby boxes. Baby hatches in Germany, baby windows in Switzerland. There's multiple countries that have had baby boxes per se. Not one time has that ever happened. They are reaching.

A fight between safe ah, Haven Baby Boxes and Safe Haven for Newborns is brewing in the Florida Senate. Why? Well, right now, state law supported by the Miami based Safe Haven organization allows parents to surrender newborns to firefighters and hospital workers without giving their names. A, new bill supported by Safe Haven Baby Boxes would give fire stations and hospitals the option to install ventilated and climate controlled boxes where parents could drop off their babies without interacting with fire or hospital employees. Now, this bill recently passed the Florida House unanimously, but there is effort to block it.

Monica Kelsey: There's an organization in Florida that gets $400,000 in government grants. They don't want to lose it. And so they fought hard to kill that bill and they won. And this is an organization that was wanting to save the lives of infants. They're on our side, they're on the same team, but they get $400,000 in government grants. We stepped forward and said, we don't take government Money. And the reason why is if we want to pray with a mom on our hotline, nobody's going to tell us. We can't. It's just not going to happen on our watch. I also get that I'm money motivated and that I make money off every box I put in. It's not true. The patent that is behind me on the wall, I patented the baby box. I sold it to safe haven for $1 so that I could never profit off of this. I don't ever want to profit off the lives of kids that have been, abandoned or saved in our boxes. And so people, I think, hear the negative and believe it when they really don't know what motivates us. And what motivates us is when I get to go to a hospital and hold a little girl in my arms that would have probably been in a trash can or a dumpster if she wouldn't have had anonymity available to her. That's what motivates us. We're not motivated by money.

Les Wriley: Why are people persecuted? From a human perspective? Now, there's a spiritual warfare behind it, but people are persecuted when they become a threat. The people that run Planned Parenthood, they don't care what you believe. They don't. The politicians don't care what you believe. The people who are trafficking children, they don't care what you believe. But when you become a threat to their power, their, money, their sin, their things they want, then they come after you. And that comes from their Father, who's the Father of lies. Because when you become a threat is when you are advancing the kingdom of Christ, when you're an instrument. And so, again, he can't do anything to Jesus. He can't do anything to God the Father. He can't hinder the work of the Spirit. He can't change the truth of the word of God. He, can attack us. but our Father owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He has unlimited riches, unlimited power. And it's not our job to win all these battles. It's our job to be faithful. How did the wall get rebuilt? In Nehemiah, it was just simple Christians doing the things right in front of them.

Monica Kelsey: You know, every time I hold one of these babies in my arms, it reminds me that it's worth it. So if I lose track for just, just a little while because of all the negativity or the problems that we're having or whatever, all I gotta do is think about why we started, why we fight so hard. And it's these infants. We have to be the hands and feet of Christ to save these lives. And it's gonna take all of us, not just Monica Kelsey in Woodburn, Indiana, starting a ministry by herself. It's not Monica Kelsey alone. We are a team. We've got hundreds of volunteers across the country. So my recommendation is don't do nothing in a movement that needs everybody. Do something. A newborn was found dead yesterday afternoon at Eagle Creek park near the back entrance off Trader's Laine and Lafayette Road.

That newborn was found, right here at Eagle Creek park, right beside that path that you see right there. Police believe the girl was born over the weekend, still had the umbilical cord attached and could have been just a day old.

Monica Kelsey: You would think that this baby died because of, the temperature. This baby didn't die because of the temperature. This baby died from blood loss because animals were gnawing at its arms and legs. The only thing left on this infant was a foot that we could get a print from. And so when you think about that, just that part of her story, it really makes you understand how important it is to keep these babies out of the wild. I don't ever want a baby to die like that again. Ever. And so we put her footprint on our logo so that we're reminded every day of the life that she had because she was born, she was here, and she was the last abandoned baby in the state of Indiana.