TIM SWARENS

Swarens: Abandoned at birth, she now fights to save other babies

Tim Swarens
tim.swarens@indystar.com

In the fourth decade of her life, Monica Kelsey learned the facts about how it all began.

About the rape of her birth mother. About the ensuing pregnancy of a frightened 17-year-old. About the decision first to seek an abortion, and then the change of heart. About her abandonment, soon after birth, at a hospital in a small Ohio town.

Abandoned, yes. But not unwanted.

Not far away, lived a husband and wife without a child of their own. What they did have was an empty house, and full hearts, and the tiny baby left behind at that hospital became the sudden answer to long-offered prayers.

It was a busy Wednesday morning 42 years later, when I caught up with Monica Kelsey. Requests for interviews had been pouring in from across the country for a week. Shortly before we connected, she had fielded questions from a TV reporter in Virginia Beach, Va.

The media attention has been prompted by action in the Indiana House in late February, a 94-0 vote to approve what's billed as "baby box" legislation.

Under the proposal, hospitals, police and fire stations, and certain nonprofits could install incubators outside their buildings. A desperate parent could place a less than one-month-old child inside the heated, padded box.

Then leave.

No questions asked. No fear of prosecution.

The boxes would be rigged to immediately alert emergency services when a child is placed inside. And, if the system works as designed, a life would be saved.

For Kelsey, the effort to ensure that babies are no longer abandoned in a woods or a trash can — as occurred in Indianapolis last year — is personal. And a passion.

"I am so grateful that my biological mother gave me an amazing gift — adoption," Kelsey, a firefighter and paramedic in the northeastern Indiana community of Woodburn, said. "I was conceived through a violent act, but that doesn't define me."

If the legislation, now in the Senate, becomes law, Indiana would become the first state in the nation to permit the use of such devices. Several other countries, including Germany, China and South Africa, have long used baby boxes as an alternative to the abandonment of babies in alleys or fields. In Canada, the boxes are called "angel cradles."

Yet, despite the unanimous vote in the Indiana House, the incubators are not without controversy.

The United Nations has pushed back against the increased use of baby boxes in Europe, where about 200 have been installed in the past decade. And child advocates in the United States, including proponents of existing Safe Haven laws, are worried that the Indiana proposal could lead to an unintended consequence — the increased abandonment of infants by parents who might have sought help by other means.

Those concerns have caught the attention of longtime state Sen. Pat Miller, a Republican from Indianapolis who chairs the Health and Provider Services Committee. She said this past week that she hasn't decided yet whether the bill will get a hearing in her committee, hasn't decided on what amendments are needed, and hasn't decided whether assignment to a study committee for review later this year is the more prudent course for now.

But she does have questions about how the proposal would work in practice.

And the proposal's driving force inside the Statehouse — state Rep. Casey Cox, a Republican from Allen County — acknowledges that not all of those questions have ready answers.

That's why, he said, the legislation would authorize the state Department of Health to take 18 months to develop standards and protocols before the installation of the first incubator. Cox also said he has considered asking for the bill to be amended to allow only hospitals to install the boxes, at least initially.

Both Cox and Kelsey insist that they have no desire to undermine Indiana's Safe Haven law, instrumental in saving more than a dozen lives since its adoption 15 years ago.

The baby boxes, they say, would be a last resort, a final option for parents too frightened, too ashamed to seek help elsewhere.

Monica Kelsey has a sense of that shame.

Thirty-seven years after she was abandoned, she traveled to Michigan to meet the woman who had given her life. To seek answers to questions that had long nagged her.

The story she heard for the first time that day shook Kelsey hard at first. Shook her concept of herself. Of her family. Of her faith.

But it also gave her a fresh purpose. And the prompt to share her story and the message that where you came from doesn't have to define where you're going.

For the next three years, Kelsey built a friendship with her birth mother, Sandy. And felt an even deeper love for her adoptive parents.

Then, in the winter of 2013, Sandy was struck with a fatal illness. The daughter she had left behind 40 years earlier was with her in the end.

"She was with me when I took my first breath," Monica Kelsey said. "I was with her when she took her last."

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens.