Coney Barrett Boxes

Sure, they won’t expand Medicaid or provide any other material support to pregnant women, but don’t say Florida won’t do anything for new mothers!

Safe Haven Baby Boxes and A Safe Haven for Newborns are two charities with similar names and the same goal: providing distressed mothers with a safe place to surrender their unwanted newborns instead of dumping them in trash cans or along roadsides.

But a fight between the two is brewing in the Florida Senate. An existing state law, supported and promoted by the Miami-based A Safe Haven, allows parents to surrender newborns to firefighters and hospital workers without giving their names. A new bill, supported by the Indiana-based Safe Haven Baby Boxes, would give fire stations and hospitals the option to install the group’s ventilated and climate-controlled boxes, where parents could drop off their babies without interacting with fire or hospital employees.

The bill recently passed the Florida House unanimously, but there is a long-shot effort to block it in the Senate, where it might be considered this week. Opponents call the boxes costly, unnecessary and potentially dangerous for the babies, mothers, firefighters and hospital workers. Each side accuses the other of being financially driven.

Speaking of delusional Republican elites and pundits, the grimly amusing thing is that Republican elites probably think that allowing mothers to drop new babies off at the Greyhound station will make near-total bans on abortion like the one Florida is about to pass less politically toxic. It’s hard to learn a lesson when your awful ideological commitments require you not to learn it.