By Stephanie Sanchez
The El Paso Times
EL PASO, Texas — West Side firefighters were watching a football game when they received a tiny but major surprise.
Somebody left a healthy, 2-day-old baby girl a foot from the doorway of Fire Station No. 22.
The drama began when the firehouse’s doorbell rang at 8:31 p.m. Sunday.
Three firefighters ran to open the door, but saw no one.
As they canvassed the area, firefighter Mark Carder noticed a bundled, white-striped towel on a chair near the doorway. Carder opened the towel and found a fair-skinned blond girl.
The baby was awake and moving. She wasn’t crying, firefighter Joshua Lopez said.
Whoever left the little girl had the law on her side.
Texas’ Baby Moses Law allows a parent to leave an unwanted, unharmed baby up to 60 days old with a designated emergency infant-care provider. No identification is necessary and no questions are to be asked of the parent.
The idea is for unprepared or unwilling parents to choose life for their baby.
Emergency providers are registered nurses and paramedics at hospitals and fire stations. They carry yellow signs that read “Safe Baby Site.”
Lopez said he and his co-workers summoned a paramedic from inside the firehouse to examine the girl.
“We just wanted to get her help. She initially looked healthy. She had good color.”
After paramedics checked the baby, they took her to Providence Memorial Hospital.
The baby, whose umbilical cord had been tied with a shoelace, had normal vital signs and was healthy, said Lt. Robert Diaz. She was wearing only a T-shirt.
Diaz said the baby cried when paramedics cleaned and changed her.
Paul Zimmerman, a spokesman for Child Protective Services, said the baby remained at the hospital early Monday but would probably be in foster care by evening.
An investigation was done to make sure the child had not been abducted. The agency worked with the police department to check for reports of a missing baby.
Nothing turned up, so a judge granted custody of the girl to the state.
The baby, who has not been given a name, will remain in foster care until she is adopted. Two families had already inquired about adopting the girl.
Legislators approved the Baby Moses Law in 1999 after 13 babies were abandoned in Houston in 10 months. Texas lawmakers wanted to encourage “desperate parents” to leave their children in a safe haven rather then abandoning them in a place where they could be harmed.
The law protects the baby’s parents from being prosecuted, provided that the child is uninjured.
Police said this baby’s abandonment fell within legal guidelines, so they were not searching for the parents.
Cases such as this one are rare in El Paso.
Zimmerman said he had not seen a baby abandonment in the last three years, since he has worked with the agency. Parents who do not want their baby, he said, are encouraged to call Child Protective Services to put the child up for adoption.
But, he said, the mother could have done worse than leave the baby girl with firefighters.
“This is just a better scenario then having a child abandoned in a ditch or on the side of the road,” he said. “The law was intended to prevent unnecessary child deaths. It’s doing that. We have a child who will, hopefully, have a loving permanent home in the future.”
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