Executive Summary: Nebraska’s safe haven law gone awry, brief thoughts on democracy.
Background
For the past several weeks, I’ve been reading and hearing so much about the problem with Nebraska’s new safe haven law. Here’s a concise summary from CNN:
You may have heard of safe haven laws. The laws are intended to allow parents to leave an infant at a hospital anonymously and not face prosecution. The goal is to try to prevent unwanted babies from being abandoned.
The problem is that unlike other states, Nebraska set no age limit when it passed its safe haven law a few months ago, so people are literally dropping off kids of all ages at Nebraska hospitals.
In some cases, they are driving to Nebraska from other states to abandon their children.
Reaction
Many have been screaming for the legislature to come back and fix the law fast, to apply only to newborns. There are horror stories of fathers who abandoned their teenage children. But now it looks like the legislature will fix the law in a special session being held this week.
I asked around and asked others who might know, did anyone warn the Nebraska legislature what could happen when they worded this law so broadly (it wasn’t limited to newborns)? Or were they warned and did they ignore the advice anyway? The consensus is that it was an unintentional consequence of legislative leaders trying to compromise to get the legislation passed.
Another Theory
Nebraska is the only state that has a unicameral legislature – there is only one chamber, or house. All the other states have a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature, usually with a House and Senate. Nebraska’s legislature has 49 members who are all called Senators. Perhaps this played a role in this public policy not being fully discussed.
There’s a good reason it is and it should be hard to pass a law – when we are regulating people’s lives, including punishments and fines, we don’t want to make it easy to just change these things on a whim. And this is definitely an argument against doing away with Hawaii’s bicameral system to save money, as Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Peter Carlisle advocates.
On Democracy
Effective representative democracy should not be based on lowest cost. Instead, it should be based on whatever principles we hold dear and should have a reasonable cost that maximizes public input, consultation, and involvement.
Proper debate, discussion, and input from the public is essential to good public policy – even if it is sometimes inconvenient for policymakers and bureaucrats. While that didn’t seem to happen the first time around, it’s good to see that Nebraskans and their legislature saw the error of their ways and are rectifying this problem now.
Of course, it always makes me wonder why any parent would want to abandon their child, but I had the good fortune to have very loving and supportive parents.
Mahalo!
Update, 11/26/2008: I forgot to reference some facts that a former co-worker from the State Capitol shared. She covered this issue in her class on statutory analysis. Originally, the bill only applied to 3-day-olds, but there was a debate to change it to 30-day-olds. In order to compromise and satisfy both sides, they went with “child,” which under the law is anyone under age 18.
[...] http://capsun.org/2008/11/20/good-public-policy-gone-bad-nebraska/ [...]