While the Alaska State Senate overwhelmingly voted in favor of establishing infant safety devices to allow struggling parents to anonymously surrender newborns in times of crisis, Anchorage Democrat Löki Tobin wanted no part of it.
She and Sen. Bert Stedman (R-Sitka) were the only holdouts against Senate Bill 9, which passed 18-2 last month.
If approved by the State House and signed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the bill would allow parents to relinquish their infant in a “baby box” – a climate-controlled environment with an automatic lock and constant video surveillance – which immediately alerts emergency services. These devices are aimed at saving babies from being abandoned in the streets.
While 22 other states already allow for this, pro-abortion Tobin said she opposes such efforts.
Prior to the vote, Tobin rose in opposition, claiming the anonymity of surrendering an infant might lead to women being abused, and she asserted that traffickers might turn over babies without a mothers consent.
“The potential misuses for these devices far outweigh the benefits,” she argued, while claiming that baby boxes don’t include safeguards like waiting periods, informed consent, or permission from the father to relinquish his child.
Tobin also expressed concern that teens might use the baby boxes to “hide or conceal their pregnancy from their parents.”
“Their parents’ right will be denied,” she said.
Ironically, these are some of the exact same issues that pro-life advocates raise when warning about the abuses women endure from abortion.
Alaska law allows minors to undergo abortions without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In fact, girls can be taken to an abortion facility by those who do not have their best interests in mind and who want the preborn baby killed.
While Tobin opposed the bill aimed at saving infants, she has yet to express any misgivings about the potential abuse or coercion of women who are pressured into aborting their babies against their will.
Her focus on abortion has instead emphasized so-called “privacy rights,” unfettered access, and opposition to any perceived barriers.
9 Comments
well there are always legal issues when adopting a baby with an unknown past especially if the drop off was done by a trafficker, a teacher, a school nurse, a school counselor, a boyfriend, a parent or grandparent, or even a husband. There could always be family members who didn’t know and would had wished they know twenty years later their relative had a baby just like grandmothers finding out school nurses aborted their daughter’s baby while she was a minor and still in high school.
Despite Alaskans needing to stop running to government to add one more thing for taxpayers to finance, despite legal challenges. Tobin and everyone else need to look at the reality that there is just not enough support from Alaskans for babies of single parents, a baby that has a deformity and disability, wives whose husbands don’t want one more child; there is a need for providing baby boxes so we don’t end up reading another headline if possible of another Baby-Jane doe dead on Cordova Street in Anchorage Ak.
Alaska also needs private assisted living homes for our Adults with mental handicaps/retardation and physical handicaps like the horizon house or providence assisted living facility on compassion. But large homes for the mentally slow.
I come across so many adults on the street with no where to drive them to and just like Cordova street’s dead baby Jane Doe those simple minded adults who act like a small child they have no place to go and the streets are no place for these kind of adults. Just like a helpless baby left on the street.
I tell you a story my last example of trying to drive a 37 year old man with he brain development of a 5 year old. I thought I was taking him to his aunt’s home. Instead he gave me instructions to an apartment building because the two men there are kind to him (I hope!) he would know if they are appropriate but from what I learnt from the young man meet us outside. This place was not appropriate for a man with mental handicaps he has. I was told the buildings were owned by Hell’s Angels, they were moving or was told that to warn me this is a dangerous place and don’t return, and before he left my car he shared one ‘friend’ kept a notebook, he writes things in it, he gives out pills and sometimes him pills, the other friend was his assistant.
Later I was asking what information in questions to Ai and Ai shared that the book was likely a ledger of a drug dealer. I tell this to point out in Alaska just like there are no places for babies to be abandoned there are no private assisted living homes that can house 50 adults like that 37 year old man in one building cared by employed CNAS instead of them living in unsafe housing as a Hells Angels building.
I even tried to go to the police stations both of them and the fire department to see if someone would come out and I can ask is there ANY place in Anchorage where this man could go because the streets are not for such a person who like a five year old can’t take care of himself. But they were dark. Its not my first time picking up a such an adult and all that’s available to drop them off is a homeless shelter during business hours but even then those places are not fit for a man and woman with mental handicaps that men them like a young child.
To All these women and young girls that want to give up their babies. Please speak to your family, friends, anyone. There’s so many couples out there, that would Love to adopt your child. Plus they will know you, and the background of their new son or daughter. These new parents will nourish and love your little one as their own.
One good thing about these boxes, is at least they’re not aborting, there innocent child.
Also of benefit to both the mother and the baby in the kind of scenario you describe is that the adopting parents can help provide prenatal resources and/or a better quality of prenatal resources that that otherwise may not be available to the mother.
Agreed Proud Alaskan. I personally know several couples who were never priveleged to have their own child. Adoption is often a difficult and expensive process and dealing with CPS a nightmare. I know! At one time I fostered newborns and adopted two well after my own children were raised. There are many good people, Tina, that would happily take some of those babies if you beuracrats didnt make it so hard.
Loki n
you need to be voter out of the Senate. You are so out of the state. Your ideas are so bad.
1.126 million abortions in 2025, 3.6 million births in 2025. roughly 1 abortion for every 3 births. What have we become
There used to be a current Texas case of a baby two years ago was adopted out of the safe baby box and now the grandparents of the mother are pressing for custody rights because they didn’t know their daughter had been pregnant by her boyfriend and the two after delivering in a hospital they left the baby in the baby box
The baby boxes are opening up entanglements and legal fights and families taking an baby with an unknown past may have to prepare for family members looking for babies they didn’t know about from the first place