Sad News: You Can No Longer Abandon Your Teenager In A Nebraska Hospital

Nobody wants to have teenagers around. And who can blame them? Teenagers are sullen, moody, expensive, they can get into worlds of trouble undreamed-of by younger children, are rarely cute, and going through adolescent rebellion and puberty. Who the hell wants that around the house?

Which may explain why when Nebraska enacted a “safe haven” law, intended to allow people who could not handle their children to drop them off without criminal liability at a hospital so they could be tended to by foster parents, twenty-nine of the thirty-five kids who got abandoned by their parents were over the age of 10, so the state had to change the law. Safe-haven laws are a good idea – it’s easy to imagine a new parent overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for a newborn, and finding himself or herself not up to the task. Some parents have been so desperate in those circumstances as to abandon their children, which is what the safe-haven law is designed to prevent.

But Nebraska’s law did not contain an age limitation for the child to be dropped off at the hospital, so some parents who decided they just couldn’t handle their pre-teen and teenage kids anymore took them to Nebraska and left them there. Hard to imagine. Of course, some people can't afford to send their kids to Troubled Teen Treatment Centers, so they may have thought of this as a low-cost alternative.