Sacramento, CA — In the spring of 1996, Joanne De la Cruz was living in a dorm room at UC-Santa Cruz when she smothered her newborn with napkins, put her son in a plastic bag and tossed him in a dumpster.
Nobody knew De la Cruz was even pregnant — and she wanted to keep it that way, especially from her parents, whom she feared would disown her. Her secret was safe until four years later when the guilt-stricken young woman broke down and confessed the crime to a therapist.
De la Cruz, who understood that her therapist was compelled by the law to tell authorities, was arrested. She's expected to enter a guilty plea to voluntary manslaughter May 31 in Santa Cruz County Superior Court, but prosecutors are entertaining an unusual plea agreement to resolve the
tragic case.
Assistant District Attorney Christine McGuire said it's still possible that De la Cruz will receive some time in jail, but what the district attorney's office really wants is for De la Cruz to do 1,000 hours of community service by helping publicize a 1 1/2-year-old law that allows desperate moms to drop off their babies at hospital emergency rooms – no questions asked.
De la Cruz, now 25 and living with her parents in Alameda County, has declined media requests. But her attorney, John Burris of Oakland, said Friday that he's hoping his client's remorse and sincere effort to help other desperate mothers will result in no jail time.
“It's my understanding that she wants to do something to honor her child,” said Debi Faris of Yucaipa, who founded a group called Garden of the Angels six years ago after hearing about a newborn in a duffel bag tossed out on a Los Angeles freeway. The baby died.
Since August 1996, Faris' organization has buried more than 50 Southern California abandoned infants in a “cemetery within a cemetery” in Calimesa, about 15 miles east of Riverside.
State and local officials say that despite widespread publicity when it cleared the Legislature and was signed by Gov. Gray Davis in September 2000, most Californians are unaware of the law.
“There's been no public awareness campaign and newborn babies have been abandoned and left to die throughout the state,” McGuire said.
In 2001, she said, eight babies were surrendered to hospitals under the provisions of the law, but six others were abandoned and found alive and another 10 were tossed in trash bins and empty fields and died. Others also may have been abandoned.
In New Jersey, which has an aggressive media campaign to publicize a similar law, not one abandoned newborn has died in the three years the law has been in effect, said Blanca Castro, spokesman for the California Department of Social Services.
In California, however, the deaths of abandoned newborns are still commonplace.
Recently, a Stockton high school student was arrested after she allegedly concealed the birth of her infant son. The baby was found dead in a garbage can at a Lake Tahoe casino. Authorities said they are awaiting results from an autopsy aimed at finding out if the baby was born alive
or stillborn before deciding whether to file charges.
State Sen. Jim Brulte, R-Rancho Cucamonga, pushed through the Safe Haven Law two years ago after being approached by Faris. Similar to laws now in effect in about three dozen other states, it allows a parent to leave a baby less than 72 hours old with an employee of any hospital emergency room. The surrender can be done anonymously and without fear of prosecution.
In an interview Friday, Brulte, the Senate's minority leader, said the original bill required social service officials to organize an outreach program.
But it never happened, so last year he penned another bill providing $3 million in outreach funding, which was trimmed to $1 million by the Senate appropriations committee.
Davis, in the midst of a state budget crisis, vetoed the second Brulte bill, saying it would “result in the expenditure of general-fund dollars that were not included in the Budget Act of 2001.'' But Davis directed the Department of Social Services to work with other state agencies to
Develop an outreach plan.
Russ Lopez, a spokesman for the governor, said one reason for the delay was that Brulte's original bill didn't allocate funds for outreach.
“There was really no legal vehicle to do it,” Lopez said.
In February, Davis, pointing to the Safe Haven Law, issued a statement saying “there is no excuse in California for a new mother to abandon her child.”
Castro said Friday that the Department of Social Services planned to use New Jersey's successful “No Blame, No Shame, No Names'' media campaign rather than reinvent the wheel. She hopes the campaign will start at the end of the summer.
The state, Castro said, has found $500,000 in child-abuse prevention funds it can use to launch the campaign. In addition, she's hoping that TV stations will run free commercials and that the California Children and Families Commission will soon bolster the outreach program with money from the state's voter-approved tobacco tax.
The Santa Cruz County District Attorney's Office hopes De la Cruz will speak to high school students, counsel pregnant moms in distress and, in general, open her heart.
Faris said she was recently speaking in a high school in Los Angeles and a young girl came up to her when class was over.
“She said, `I'm one of those mothers. Two years ago I was 15 and I became pregnant and could not tell my parents, so I threw my baby away. I will have to live with that the rest of my life.'
“I held her and we cried.”
For the complete article, see the San Jose Mercury News.
(This article courtesy of Steven Ertelt and the Pro-Life Infonet email newsletter. For more information or to subscribe go to www.prolifeinfo.org or email [email protected].)
