In April 2025, a 22-year-old in Macon was arrested after allegedly giving birth and putting an infant in a trash bag. She was also charged with attempted murder. That same year, a 22-year-old in Columbus was arrested after allegedly giving birth and leaving an infant in a dumpster. She was also charged with attempted murder.
Now there’s a new option in Georgia to help mothers in distress.
The Safe Haven Baby Box is designed to help people in crisis surrender their infant safely and anonymously. The device — the first of its kind in the state — was unveiled last week at the Henry County Fire Department Station #6 in Ellenwood. The box, which is built into the wall of the fire station, is temperature controlled and set up with alarms to alert firefighters, police, and EMS when a baby is dropped off.
The state’s Safe Haven law, which was recently updated to legalize these boxes, gives a parent up to 45 days after child’s birth to surrender an infant without providing identification at a hospital, fire station, law enforcement facility, and at a Safe Haven Baby Box.
Henry County Fire Chief Pat Wilson said he believes baby boxes will provide an extra layer of anonymity that could keep people from abandoning infants.
“[With] the previous law, you had to physically bring the baby to the fire station and deliver it to someone, so it had to be face-to-face contact. I believe that there were people that maybe wanted to or felt they had a need [to surrender an infant], but they did not want to face that shame,” Wilson told Capital B Atlanta. “And I think that probably stopped some people who were going through a difficult time trying to make a tough decision. It kept them from doing the right thing.”
Henry County officials are planning to build four more boxes at other fire stations across the county.
Monica Kelsey, the founder of Safe Haven Baby Boxes, said her hope is that the boxes save the lives of both mothers and infants. She sees these devices as a way to reach those in crisis.
“The program is to keep babies out of dumpsters and trash cans because their mothers freaked out, didn’t know what to do, and didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “There’s a lot of programs out there that are intended to reach them; however, the ones that fall through the cracks are the ones that we get.”
Safe Haven Baby Boxes are currently located in 27 states, Kelsey said.
“So that last resort option is us … because these women who don’t utilize a safe option are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison,” she said.
While proponents see the baby boxes as a meaningful solution to addressing infant abandonment, others argue that the boxes don’t address what they see as the root cause of the problem: the lack of access to reproductive healthcare in the U.S.
Dana Sussman, the vice president of the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, said she viewed baby boxes as the “wrong approach” to the nationwide maternal health issues that have disproportionately impacted Black women.
“I think that the world that we are fighting for is one in which people are not facing that desperate situation — where they have the right to access abortion, where they have the support that they need to make fully informed decisions, where they can get medical care, whether it’s access to comprehensive prenatal care or labor and delivery support in the hospital,” Sussman said.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, researchers found that states like Georgia that implemented restrictive abortion laws had higher than expected infant mortality after the bans took effect. According to a study published last year by researchers with the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the increases were especially prominent among groups that already had higher than average infant mortality rates, including Black infants and those in Southern states.
From 2021 to 2023 in Georgia, Black infants had the highest infant mortality rate of all racial groups, according to March of Dimes.
Kelsey said her focus was saving babies after they’re born, adding that infant abandonment cases occur even in states with accessible abortion laws. She noted that her organization has a crisis line that residents can call for support and guidance.
“We’re never going to tell a mother what to do. We’re never going to tell her what’s best for her. What we’re going to do is we’re going to give her the options that are available in her community,” Kelsey said. “There might be a baby box. There might not be a baby box. But we’re going to give her all the options that are available and where she’s at, and then you know let her choose and walk alongside her.”
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