The anti-life ‘elitists’ fighting to destroy safe haven laws and baby boxes 

Across the nation, multiple state legislators are utilizing talking points and narratives provided by abortion-minded professionals and radical activists who are coordinating efforts to stop the expansion of Safe Haven laws and Safe Haven Baby Boxes (SHBB). Tragically, these extremists are seeing some success.

According to Safe Haven Baby Boxes, as of February 2025, there are over 300 boxes across 20 states with “cutting-edge technology,” including a “temperature-controlled, ventilated, and padded bassinet, designed to ensure the baby’s safety and comfort.” SHBB founder Monica Kelsey claims that over 200 babies have been saved by the baby boxes program since its implementation in the U.S.

Given this, it is important to know which organizations and leaders are behind this anti-lifesaving movement — and what their true motives are. 

The voices opposing Safe Haven laws and Baby Boxes

In November 2024, a joint letter was sent to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calling for oversight of the baby boxes. The main signatures included Lori Bruce, associate director at Yale University, Clara S. Lewis, Senior Lecturer at Dartmouth College, and Mark Mercurio with the Yale University School of Medicine. 

Shortly after, citing their own letter, the “Strategic Working Group” published a “Legislative Report: U.S. Policy Responses to Infant Abandonment and Infanticide,” alluding to the idea that pro-life legislation and court rulings are consequently resulting in an increase in birth rates in some areas (as if rising birth rates is a bad thing), resulting in an increased risk of child abandonment, and thereby resulting in an increased effort to expand Safe Haven laws and baby boxes. 

Lori Bruce, along with Clara S. Lewis and Mark R. Mercurio, also wrote a paper entitled “Infanticide and Infant Abandonment: New Directions in U.S. Law and Policy,” published in the American Academy of Pediatrics, a publication with a policy statement of “Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents,” and “The Adolescent’s Right to Confidential Care When Considering Abortion,” as previously reported by Live Action News. 

The trio has also teamed up with other abortion activist groups like Bastard Nation — an adoptee rights organization, whose founder, Marley Greiner, also launched STOP BABY BOXES NOW in an effort to track and defeat legislation expanding SHBB locations across the country. Greiner was one of the signatories of the opposition letter authored by Bruce, Lewis, and Mercurio and sent to HHS. Greiner’s objectives are to promote abortion access, stop baby boxes, and end the very existence of Safe Haven laws. 

Distorted worldview shapes professional opinions falsely presented as fact

In a 2023 article in The Progressive Magazine, Bruce blames pro-life laws and the overturning of Roe v. Wade as the reasons for infant abandonment, stating, “The legal landscape is shifting in alarming ways—which traumatizes birth parents and children alike through unwanted births while feeding a profitable adoption system” (emphasis added).

Bruce further claimed that the use of SHBB is evidence of women being “forced into pregnancy and childbirth” and that in places like Indiana the real issue is that women do not have access to birth control or abortion, arguing that the money Indiana has chosen to invest into expanding SHBB should have instead gone to so-called “financed birth control.” 

In a 2018 publication published by Bioethics Today, Bruce argued against the conscience rights of medical professionals  provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Conscience and Religious Freedom Division (CRFD), stating, “Patients belonging to LGBTQ populations as well as patients seeking reproductive health services (abortions, birth control, and vasectomies) or assisted suicide (where legal) now face uncertain care.” 

Mark Mercurio, co-director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and director of Yale Pediatrics Ethics Program, often cites the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s former “special affiliate” and research arm) as a “great resource” and frequently leads panel discussions with colleagues who described pregnancies without abortion access as “forced pregnancies” with deadly consequences, and presented religious traditions’ historical condemnation of abortion as “part of a patriarchal system of male control over women’s bodies.” 

Could it be that these individuals in this coordinated effort perceive baby boxes and Safe Haven laws as a threat against their blatant anti-life personal views? 

Nonsensical circular arguments against life-saving devices

Similar to narratives that claim “adoption is not a solution to abortion,” proponents against SHBB proclaim, “‘Baby Boxes’ Aren’t a Solution to Roe’s Repeal,” stating that the use of Safe Haven laws and SHBB are too traumatic for the child and the parent. 

In her testimony to the Connecticut State Legislature opposing Senate Bill 1310 (which would have granted authorization to hospitals to install baby boxes in emergency departments), Lori Bruce states, “We know from the extensive work by Gretchen Sisson, an adoption scholar, that women who relinquish their children suffer from unrelenting grief.” 

“Adoption scholar” Gretchen Sisson? The same Gretchen Sisson who is lead investigator for ANSIRH’s (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) Abortion Onscreen program which tracks abortion’s representation in media? ANSIRH, funded by the Packard Foundation, which Live Action News previously reported trains abortionists and helped to fund the abortion pill’s manufacturer, Danco.  

There is nothing more traumatic and final to preborn children and their mothers than the well-documented truth of life-ending, violent abortion procedures for which Bruce and her colleagues consistently advocate.

Abortion Doctors Share How The Most Common Abortion Procedures Take Place

Like Bruce, Clara Lewis blamed pro-life laws for child abandonment cases in an article for the Chicago Tribune, and also testified against SB 1310. 

Other allegations against Safe Haven laws and SHBB are that they are “anti-family.”

Foster and adoptive mother Christina Bennett provided testimony in favor of Connecticut bill SB 1310, and responded to claims by opponents that baby boxes, adoption, and Safe Haven laws in general, are anti-family: 

Families are made through biology, families are made through the choice of adoption, and families are made in really challenging circumstances where there has been trauma, and there has been brokenness, but good people are willing to come together and try to bring some light into a dark situation…

But even in those circumstances, when you have mothers and fathers who are willing to foster and to adopt, then that love makes a beautiful family.

Bennett concluded, “Safe Haven laws are not anti-family. Safe Haven laws show the beauty and the redemption of foster and adoptive parents coming together to make a family.” 

Pro-life advocate Melissa Manion also testified against this narrative, compelled by her own experience after the tragic death of a baby left to die in the closet of a home in her community:

I cannot imagine the pain that baby endured gasping for air, alone, starving, crying with no one coming to help. And frankly, the anguish that young mother will live with for the rest of her life, knowing she left her baby to die scared and alone.

If our state had had baby drop-off stations, then that child could still be alive, and that mother could have been free.  

Manion closed by pointing out the irony of opposition against SHBB in a state where abortion is freely permitted:

[Connecticut is] one of the most ‘pro-choice’ states in the country, and now all of a sudden we’re going to dictate the parameters under which a mother can surrender her baby?…

I’m extremely confused how it’s ok under any circumstance whatsoever to terminate up until 24 weeks of gestation and up until birth for the ‘health of the mother,’ and the life of the child in the womb is ended, but according to many I’ve heard tonight, it’s not ok to surrender a child safely to a safe haven box.

Disturbed by the opposition against baby boxes, two other women testified in favor of SB 1310, both stating they wished baby boxes were an option at the time of their abortions and believed the voices of the opposition diminished and ignored the realities in their communities. 

Janice T. Fleming-Butler, founder of Voices of Women of Color, testified in favor of the bill as well:

We have witnessed several women in our community were from housing projects who have left their babies in hallways and parks and other places that were unsafe…

And tonight I heard a lot of conversations about data, where’s the data, and how do we know it is happening to these women, but I can tell you first hand that the media, nor doctors, nor legislators, were in our communities when these babies were being left behind.

Representative Trenee McGee, a pro-life Democrat, stated that she believed a lot of the arguments against the bill sounded elitist. Fleming-Butler agreed: 

More importantly, some of the language that was based around coming from certain entities that don’t live my experience and never have…

This isn’t a figment of our imagination; we’ve seen babies abandoned, so when people put out these numbers, I am constantly reminded of how invisible we are because we are not counted in those numbers.

Conclusion 

The most vocal members of the coalition opposing baby boxes Safe Haven laws are simultaneously promoting anti-life policies and traumatic life-ending abortions, calling into question their true motivations. One thing is certain: the mounting efforts to stop these life-saving emergency measures are advancing a culture of death disguised as concern for human lives.