Backfilling last week's agenda, with health-related bills in Bold font.

House Committee on Families and Veterans, Rep. Kathy Schmaltz, Chair

Tuesday, August 12, 2025    12:00 PM

AGENDA

HB 4517 (Rep. Neyer)

Law enforcement: reports; communications under the amber alert act; modify.

HB 4518 (Rep. Rigas)

Law enforcement: reports; Michigan Amber alert act; modify.

HB 4676 (Rep. MacDonell)

Mental health: guardians; appointing certain guardians after considering least restrictive means; require.

HB 4677 (Rep. Wozniak)

Probate: guardians and conservators; provision for supported decision-making agreements; create.

HB 4067 (Rep. Bruck)

Children: protection; safe delivery of newborns law; modify definition of newborn and allow surrender to a newborn safety device.

HB 4069 (Rep. Wortz)

Children: protection; reference in Michigan penal code to surrender of a newborn under the newborn safe delivery law; revise.

HB 4368 (Rep. Woolford)

Children: protection; reporting death of a newborn after surrender to a newborn safety device; expand.

OR ANY BUSINESS PROPERLY BEFORE THIS COMMITTEE

The foster care benefits bill passed committee.

Tuesday, August 26, 2025     12:00 PM

AGENDA

HB 4750 (Rep. Schmaltz)     Children: foster care; department to use or conserve benefits for children in foster care in the best interests of the children in foster care; provide.

Presentation from Ann Rudisil, Founder and CEO, Downriver for Vets on Veteran Benefit Screening and Tiny Homes Projects

Time's longform article on newborn surrender helps frame the debate on "baby boxes" with nationwide data and valuable historic context.

It's worth a full read. I've clipped portions here due to length.

https://time.com/7299476/baby-box-infant-abandonment/

Why Baby Boxes Are Suddenly Everywhere

Oct 8, 2025 9:26 AM ET

....

In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision that gave states the ability to essentially outlaw abortion, communities and nonprofits are installing these baby boxes, which cost more than $16,000 each, in hopes of reducing dangerous infant-­abandonment rates and giving more options to women who must carry pregnancies to term. They say the alternative is that mothers will break the law and abandon their infants somewhere unsafe. So far, 22 infants have been abandoned in 2025, according to the National Safe Haven Alliance; 11 were found alive, and 11 were deceased.

In the past two decades, nearly two dozen mostly red states have amended their safe-haven laws, which allow people to anonymously give up their infants for adoption through face-to-face surrenders at hospitals and fire stations, to also permit people to surrender babies in these boxes. The trend has picked up in the past few years.

Mississippi, for instance, passed a law in 2023 that changed its safe-haven law to allow infants to be dropped off in a “baby safety device,” and Alabama followed shortly after, allowing the installation of baby boxes at hospitals and fire stations. Now, baby boxes have been approved in more than 18 states, largely ones with near total bans on abortion, including Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Idaho, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Florida, South Dakota, and North Dakota. They’re supported by antiabortion groups, which say they provide another safe way for mothers in crisis to surrender their babies.

For politicians, the legislation is a low-cost way to seemingly solve a bipartisan issue. “I saw this as a threefold bill: saving a baby’s life, keeping a young lady from making the worst decision of her life and being charged with manslaughter, and giving more of those who want to be parents the opportunity for a baby,” Representative Donna Givens, the Republican freshman legislator who sponsored the bill in Alabama, told me at the ceremony.

Some places are even spending public funds for these boxes. In 2022, Indiana set aside $1 million to install and promote safe-haven boxes, and San Antonio budgeted $500,000 in 2024. In a May bill, Missouri earmarked $250,000 to help install at least 25 more baby boxes. Lawmakers in states including Tennessee and Arkansas have introduced legislation that would ensure that every county in the state has a baby box. “It’s just growing like wildfire,” Givens says.

But as baby boxes spread, other people are questioning whether this is the best way to support women in crisis. Dozens of doctors, politicians, adoption advocates, ethicists, and lawyers wrote a letter in November 2024 to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services arguing that the boxes “are fraught with unintended harms and negative consequences.” The letter argues that the boxes are unregulated and uninspected by the government, which means they could potentially endanger infants; that the lack of face-to-face interaction in a baby-box surrender deprives mothers of any counseling or medical help after the difficult task of birthing the baby alone and then giving it away; that the anonymous nature of the boxes means that children won’t have any way to know their family or medical history; and that the boxes may also help conceal crimes like rape, incest, or human trafficking.

Lori Bruce, a professor of bioethics at Yale University and one of the letter’s main signatories, says the proliferation of baby boxes and the fanfare surrounding them—most are featured in local news when they open—might lead women to feel as if abandoning their infants is the only choice with support or investment behind it.

“The signs on these boxes don’t provide options; they don’t say you can go to a hospital, where there may be funds to help you keep your baby,” Bruce says. In many ways, the boxes overlook the trauma of surrendering a child, she says, even though “the absolute vast majority of parents who feel that they have to relinquish their child experience unrelenting grief and trauma that never goes away.”

Some critics also argue that the money being spent on boxes would be better spent on giving women the financial and emotional support they need to raise their children. Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of the 2024 book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, interviewed dozens of mothers who gave up their newborns for adoption between 2000 and 2020. Most said they would have kept their babies had they had things like a car seat, for example, or an extra $1,000 to spend on the child’s care. Most regretted giving their babies up for adoption and went through a long period of depression after the relinquishment.

There’s little evidence that these boxes actually reduce infant-­abandonment rates, especially since all U.S. states already allow women to anonymously surrender their newborns at hospitals and fire stations. In Germany, where the first baby boxes appeared around 2000, studies showed they led to no reduction in infant death or abandonment.

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The company that’s cornered the baby-box market

In the U.S., almost every baby box is sold by a single Indiana nonprofit: Safe Haven Baby Boxes. The device is essentially a big temperature-­controlled drawer installed on the side of a building with a lot of information printed on the outside, including the phone number for a crisis line run by Safe Haven Baby Boxes that helps guide people through the process of surrendering a child. When a person opens the drawer and places a baby in the bassinet inside, three separate alarms sound to alert first responders, and an orange bag falls out with information about what rights a parent has, and what a mother’s body experiences after birth.

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