In America’s heartland a battle is raging over so-called safe haven laws which enable parents to freely turn over custody of their children to various organizations like hospitals and fire departments. Most states have safe haven laws which allow parents of infants to abandon the children in hopes of reducing the rates of infanticide and infant abuse. Nebraska, however, has a safe haven law without an age limit, meaning that even teenagers can be abandoned without repurcussions for the parents. Interestingly, teenagers have actually made up the largest group of abandoned children in Nebraska, with some as old as 17 being left.

But with teenagers making up the largest number of abandoned children, Governor Dave Heineman announced a special session of the state legislature on Friday to address the issue. The decision led to an increase in abandonments.

Among the teenagers so far abandoned, six were aged 17, two were 16 years old, six were 15, three were 14-year-olds and three were aged 13. Another eight children aged 11 or 12 were abandoned.

Although I feel strongly that infants and very young children need some kind of safety net to protect them due to their complete inability to care for themselves, I can’t for the life of me imagine why a 17 year old needs a safe haven law to protect them from being abandoned by their parents. At 17, a “child” is old enough to work, become emancipated and live on their own. Do they really need these safe haven protections?

Perhaps, instead of extending safe haven laws almost into adulthood, the answer to the problem of child abandonment can be better answered by encouraging parents to take a more active role in their children’s lives and encouraging personal responsibility among all members of society. Instead of ramping up the welfare state to take care of all of our problems for us and medicating ourselves when the stress becomes too much to deal with, perhaps a better solution is to spark a fundamental shift in American society which encourages each man, woman and child to look for solutions to their own problems instead of looking to pass those problems off on others.

Safe haven laws are certainly beneficial in the case of teenage mothers who would sooner leave an infant in a dumpster than care for it. However, by creating a society of personal responsibility, perhaps we could eventually reach a point where safe haven is no longer needed.