Photo: AP

Mothers of unwanted newborns can now anonymously leave their babies in one of two padded, climate-controlled “baby boxes” attached to fire stations in northeastern Indiana, the Associated Press reports.

The Indiana state legislature passed the law allowing the use of baby boxes last year. Republican state Rep. Casey Cox told the AP at the time that the book drop for babies was a “natural progression” of safe haven laws that permit parents to give up their newborns at hospitals and police stations without fear of prosecution. But even though there are safe haven laws enacted in all 50 states, thousands of abandoned children slipped through the cracks.

Dawn Geras, president of the Save the Abandoned Babies Foundation in Chicago, said safe haven laws have resulted in more than 2,800 safe surrenders since 1999. But more than 1,400 other children have been found illegally abandoned, nearly two-thirds of whom died.

The Indiana boxes are produced by a company called Safe Haven Baby Boxes, which was founded by Monica Kelsey, a firefighter and paramedic who has been advocating for baby drops for years. (Kelsey’s mother, a rape survivor, abandoned her at the hospital where she was born.) The Knights of Columbus of Indiana have promised to pay for the first 100 boxes to be installed.

But not everyone’s a fan. In December, State Department of Health officials recommended against using incubators. “A team of child health experts,” a department spokeswoman told the Star, “carefully studied available research on newborn safety incubators and determined that there are no standards or protocols that can ensure the safety of children placed in these devices.”

Kelsey says that the box’s design has been improved to accommodate the Health Department’s concerns: It locks automatically when a baby is placed inside, and energy dispatch receives an alert within a minute. Emergency workers would ideally retrieve the baby within five minutes. And importantly, Kelsey says, the boxes guarantee anonymity for desperate mothers.

“This is not criminal,” she told the AP. “This is legal. We don’t want to push women away.”