In today’s news, we read that babies are being abandoned in the state of Texas at an alarming rate. The same thing happened 100 years ago.
In the case below, a baby girl was abandoned in a man’s car while he was visiting a hospital. The infant was taken to the hospital for care and prepared for adoption.
Where Can My Mother Be?
A wistful mite of a girl lies in her tony cot at the Methodist Hospital and solemnly regards the endless line of baby-loving persons who have been visiting her since she was left, wrapped in her new pink blanket, in a machine in front of the hospital Monday night.
“Babby Betty Joe,” as she has been named by nurses, was found by R.R. Mulvihill when he went to his auto about 7:30 p.m., after a visit in the hospital. Pinned to the blanket was a note in a woman’s handwriting, reading:
“If you can’t take care of this child, take it to a hospital. I can’t take care of it.”
The note was unsigned.
Down in the deep blue eyes shines the hopeless query:
“Where can my mother be?”
Restless Fingers
Where can be the mother of so lovable a baby girl, scarcely more than two weeks old, sitting alone somewhere, thinking about her, perhaps, remembering those tender little rosebud lips, the quivering eyelids fringed with tiny lashes; that small, shapely little head covered with red-gold down, rapidly turning brown! Restless, infinitely tiny baby fingers search, search constantly, closing on other women’s fingers, only to loosen and search again. They are not Mother’s fingers. No. She felt them once. She will know them again when they touch her. But will they ever touch her again? This is the question she puts wordlessly to every woman who bends over her crib. Tiny, restless fingers, searching.
Predict Adoption
“She won’t be with us long,” the nurses say. “Such a perfect baby! So healthy, so perfectly clean-blooded. And the streams of people that come to see her are wild about her.”
Source: The Indianapolis times. (Indianapolis [Ind.]), 20 Nov. 1925.
