And wasn’t France also where all those bedbugs were as well, sometime within the last year iirc.:-)
There were high suspicions of this being media fear-mongering, as the whole thing disappeared as soon as another big news happened (7th of October I think)
Nothing is fully good or fully bad, there’s issues everywhere as you said.
Just stumbled upon this while thinking about the French kids getting scurvy
‘Baby in a dumpster.’ A spate of abandoned newborns unsettles Texas.
HOUSTON — The call came in on the fire truck’s radio on a blazing hot summer afternoon: “Baby in a dumpster.”
“It didn’t specify alive or dead,” Patrick Pequet remembers.
He and fellow firefighters arrived within minutes, pulling into the rear parking lot of an apartment complex in the southwest quadrant of this sprawling city. Police were already there, as were the several residents who had frantically summoned them, standing near a blue dumpster crowded by discarded boxes, scattered trash and garbage bags.
In one of those bags, a baby had been crying. Now, only silence.
“They didn’t want to touch it,” Pequet says. “It was very still.”
A quarter century ago, prompted by a spate of abandoned babies in Houston, this state became the first in the country to pass a safe haven law allowing parents to relinquish newborns at designated places — without questions or risk of prosecution. Yet “Baby Moses” surrenders remain rare in Texas, and another series of abandoned infants since spring in the Houston area has prompted much soul-searching.
In June, a baby boy was left next to a clothing donation bin on the city’s southeast side and a baby girl in some bushes in Katy, a western suburb. Both were saved.
By August, two other babies had been found: in an industrial ditch in north Houston and in a trash truck’s compactor in a far northwest neighborhood. Both were dead.
“There apparently has been … a little bit of an epidemic on this,” a Harris County sheriff’s official noted during a media briefing near the ditch where the infant girl’s partially clothed body was discovered in August by a landscaping crew.
Statewide, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, at least 18 babies have been abandoned this year. The latest occurred just before Christmas at a Whataburger in San Antonio. A decade ago, the number was seven.
Whether there’s a pattern or common link in these tragedies is not clear. But they’re happening in a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans — with no exceptions for rape or incest — and one of the highest birth rates.
Critics argue that’s no coincidence. Texas is ranked next to last for women’s health and reproductive care, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which supports independent research on such issues. And with legislators having repeatedly cut funding for that care, the percentage of women without health insurance is higher here than in any other state. This year, Gov. Greg Abbott ® ordered Texas public hospitals to track the cost of treating immigrants who are in the country illegally, potentially deterring women from seeking care for fear of being turned over to authorities.
“All of these intersectional things could be leading to this,” said Blake Rocap, a lawyer with the Sissy Farenthold Reproductive Justice Defense Project at the University of Texas at Austin. The chilling effect of the near-total abortion ban, he believes, is compounded by “abysmal” access to prenatal care, “particularly for people without private insurance, particularly for people without immigration status.”
And for all the angst every time a newborn is found, Republican leaders who control state government have long declined to fund an awareness campaign so that new mothers know where to turn should they decide that they cannot keep their baby.
In his 2½ years as a Houston firefighter and paramedic, Pequet has responded to several abandoned baby calls. Each child had been left in a dumpster. None survived.
He expected another grim outcome as he knelt on the ground that July afternoon in the apartment complex parking lot, a scene filmed by a resident on a cellphone.
The dark-haired newborn was still covered in the waxy substance that had protected him in the womb, and his umbilical cord was still attached. Pequet gently lifted him out of the trash bag and swaddled him in a small blanket another firefighter had ready. The moment felt intense. Pequet wondered whether the woman responsible would ever be located.
“We were probably the first people to hold the baby with any kind of good intentions,” he said later.
The infant, whom officials named Gabriel after the archangel protector, would live.
Gabriel’s mother, a Guatemalan migrant teen named Everilda Cux-Ajtzalam, was arrested a few days after his rescue.
How that came to be widened the circle of those affected by his abandonment — from first responders like 25-year-old Pequet and neighbors like Faustina Salazar to investigators and prosecutors, including Assistant District Attorney Steven Belt, who initially handled the case against Cux-Ajtzalam as she was charged with felony child abandonment.
As it turned out, the baby’s delivery and the immediate aftermath were captured by a parking lot security camera. While the prosecutor declined to share the video, citing the ongoing case, he described what’s on it:
Cux-Ajtzalam first appears coming out of a taco truck parked in front of the brick apartment complex.
“Traffic’s going by,” Belt says. “At one point, you can see people walking by.”
The food truck, which Cux-Ajtzalam was running solo for the owner, blocks any street view as she kneels and gives birth next to the vehicle. “It was amazing no one heard her screams,” he says, before reconsidering since the video has no sound. “Maybe she wasn’t screaming.”
Cux-Ajtzalam then takes trash bags to pick up the newborn without ever touching him. “She doesn’t even look at the child while it’s laying on the ground. Literally scoops it,” Belt says. She pours water from a jug onto the parking lot, washing away the afterbirth. Then she picks up the bags, places them in a small trash can and “goes to the dumpster and drops it there.”
Salazar came by on her way back from taking her wash to the community laundry room. “I walked about 10 steps when I heard the baby,” she recounted recently in Spanish. She saw Cux-Ajtzalam, whom she didn’t know, standing in front of the dumpster and asked if she heard the crying.
Yes, the young woman replied, without seeming alarmed. Salazar began to panic — “Where is it? Maybe it’s in the trash!” she remembers saying — and told Cux-Ajtzalam to get the complex’s manager. When she instead walked away, Salazar called her son in her apartment. He phoned 911 and rushed out to help.
They were the first to see the baby, Salazar untying the bag so he could breathe: “He put his hand out, like ‘thanks.’ I will never forget it.” The 72-year-old house cleaner would become a critical link for police, whom body-camera footage shows getting to the scene moments later. After an ambulance left with the newborn, Salazar told a detective about the young woman she had seen at the dumpster.
Gabriel soon was placed with local foster parents. The prosecutor went to visit him, and he marveled at his tiny head, the soft spot where his skull was still forming, his hands with “the longest little fingers” that always seemed to work their way out of his wrap.
The couple gave Belt a photo that he put on his desk at work: Gabriel in a yellow-striped onesie, hair a fluffy black helmet, mouth a tiny pink bow. The caption: “Treasured beyond measure.”
Police have identified a parent in four of the six abandoned-baby cases in the Houston area this year, though only one other individual had been charged as of mid-December. In the other cases, one autopsy was inconclusive and the second remained pending, so authorities still didn’t know whether either child was born alive.
No matter the circumstances, desperation is a common thread.
The 28-year-old woman who gave birth next to the clothing donation bin in late June had been living at a homeless camp around the corner, a witness said; court records show a lengthy criminal record that includes arrests for assault, prostitution and drug possession.
And the 22-year-old woman whose newborn ended up in the garbage truck’s compactor told investigators she had passed out while showering, then awakened to find she had delivered. When she realized the infant was dead, she said, she panicked and put the body in the trash. A trash crew making its rounds through a neighborhood discovered the body.
“At first, the sanitation guy thought it was a doll. He goes over and touches it and realizes it was a real baby,” said Lt. Mike Santos, a veteran sheriff’s homicide investigator. “When we got there, it’s still in the trash truck. It was horrible.”
Even with a record $32.7 billion budget surplus, state lawmakers here have not committed any money to raise awareness in hopes of preventing babies from being abandoned. Instead, they allocated $165 million this fiscal year to programs offering alternatives to abortion, including crisis pregnancy centers that claim to provide women unbiased guidance but have been accused of deceptive practices. The appropriation included at least $2 million for an initiative promoting adoption, with targeted messages that detractors consider misleading.
The South Texas Republican who authored the safe haven law doesn’t take issue with those decisions. “The problem is, if you do state funding, then you’re tied to it,” Rep. Geanie Morrison explained recently when asked about an awareness campaign. “Better to have it be a local issue.”
By contrast, Nebraska recently updated its safe haven law to add a hotline and $75,000 for educational measure
Thanks for sharing. It helps illustrate that while “Nothing is fully good or fully bad, there’s issues everywhere”, yet not equally so - some places bring on their own problems by virtue of their own obstinacy.
Which despite how I pointed out the link to disinformation campaigns, yet still those could not work unless there was already something existing to tap into. The latter may vary from place to place but like breaking into a home or waging a more traditional form of warfare, eventually it can get gotten around: and yet, the more care and concern is paid to prevention measures the less likely than each incursion will work and thereby the more expensive and longer the whole process takes - which in turn decreases the likelihood that it will work at all (I mean that defenses can be surmounted, but will they is another question altogether).
And this is why I have less and less hope for democracy in the USA as time goes on - unless ranked choice voting could be implemented, we might already be beyond a point where it is fixable and we could just be coasting now until this fiction is discarded entirely by those who hold the real power and don’t see the benefit of keeping the political sphere around any longer. Which would be a tragedy beyond measure and could lead to a very realistic WWIII situation what with all the nukes, but just bc it shouldn’t happen doesn’t mean that it won’t.:-(
That said, Fareed Zakaria seems to hold the exact opposite opinion and that is strongly giving me pause as I think about what he’s saying, as he does know quite a bit more about such things than I:-).
“America bad. Europe not bad.”
It’s nothing we “aren’t ready to hear” but things we’ve heard on repeat for years. We know.
Unpopular opinion: I’m tired of hearing the smug ‘hurr ur cuntry sucks lol’ shit, myself.
I mean, you see the article this week where poor children were getting scurvy and gettting seriously ill?
Yeah, that was France, not Kentucky.
You know, the same country Le Pen has a really legitimate chance of heading the next government of, too.
Shit’s fucked everywhere, so maybe a little introspection might be worth considering on the part of some of the ‘europe good, amerikkka bad’ crowd?
And wasn’t France also where all those bedbugs were as well, sometime within the last year iirc.:-)
Nothing is fully good or fully bad, there’s issues everywhere as you said.
There were high suspicions of this being media fear-mongering, as the whole thing disappeared as soon as another big news happened (7th of October I think)
Just stumbled upon this while thinking about the French kids getting scurvy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/12/28/abandoned-baby-texas-abortion-ban/
article
HOUSTON — The call came in on the fire truck’s radio on a blazing hot summer afternoon: “Baby in a dumpster.”
“It didn’t specify alive or dead,” Patrick Pequet remembers.
He and fellow firefighters arrived within minutes, pulling into the rear parking lot of an apartment complex in the southwest quadrant of this sprawling city. Police were already there, as were the several residents who had frantically summoned them, standing near a blue dumpster crowded by discarded boxes, scattered trash and garbage bags.
In one of those bags, a baby had been crying. Now, only silence.
“They didn’t want to touch it,” Pequet says. “It was very still.”
A quarter century ago, prompted by a spate of abandoned babies in Houston, this state became the first in the country to pass a safe haven law allowing parents to relinquish newborns at designated places — without questions or risk of prosecution. Yet “Baby Moses” surrenders remain rare in Texas, and another series of abandoned infants since spring in the Houston area has prompted much soul-searching.
In June, a baby boy was left next to a clothing donation bin on the city’s southeast side and a baby girl in some bushes in Katy, a western suburb. Both were saved.
By August, two other babies had been found: in an industrial ditch in north Houston and in a trash truck’s compactor in a far northwest neighborhood. Both were dead.
“There apparently has been … a little bit of an epidemic on this,” a Harris County sheriff’s official noted during a media briefing near the ditch where the infant girl’s partially clothed body was discovered in August by a landscaping crew.
Statewide, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, at least 18 babies have been abandoned this year. The latest occurred just before Christmas at a Whataburger in San Antonio. A decade ago, the number was seven.
Whether there’s a pattern or common link in these tragedies is not clear. But they’re happening in a state with one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans — with no exceptions for rape or incest — and one of the highest birth rates.
Critics argue that’s no coincidence. Texas is ranked next to last for women’s health and reproductive care, according to the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which supports independent research on such issues. And with legislators having repeatedly cut funding for that care, the percentage of women without health insurance is higher here than in any other state. This year, Gov. Greg Abbott ® ordered Texas public hospitals to track the cost of treating immigrants who are in the country illegally, potentially deterring women from seeking care for fear of being turned over to authorities.
“All of these intersectional things could be leading to this,” said Blake Rocap, a lawyer with the Sissy Farenthold Reproductive Justice Defense Project at the University of Texas at Austin. The chilling effect of the near-total abortion ban, he believes, is compounded by “abysmal” access to prenatal care, “particularly for people without private insurance, particularly for people without immigration status.”
And for all the angst every time a newborn is found, Republican leaders who control state government have long declined to fund an awareness campaign so that new mothers know where to turn should they decide that they cannot keep their baby.
In his 2½ years as a Houston firefighter and paramedic, Pequet has responded to several abandoned baby calls. Each child had been left in a dumpster. None survived.
He expected another grim outcome as he knelt on the ground that July afternoon in the apartment complex parking lot, a scene filmed by a resident on a cellphone.
The dark-haired newborn was still covered in the waxy substance that had protected him in the womb, and his umbilical cord was still attached. Pequet gently lifted him out of the trash bag and swaddled him in a small blanket another firefighter had ready. The moment felt intense. Pequet wondered whether the woman responsible would ever be located.
“We were probably the first people to hold the baby with any kind of good intentions,” he said later.
The infant, whom officials named Gabriel after the archangel protector, would live.
Gabriel’s mother, a Guatemalan migrant teen named Everilda Cux-Ajtzalam, was arrested a few days after his rescue.
How that came to be widened the circle of those affected by his abandonment — from first responders like 25-year-old Pequet and neighbors like Faustina Salazar to investigators and prosecutors, including Assistant District Attorney Steven Belt, who initially handled the case against Cux-Ajtzalam as she was charged with felony child abandonment.
As it turned out, the baby’s delivery and the immediate aftermath were captured by a parking lot security camera. While the prosecutor declined to share the video, citing the ongoing case, he described what’s on it:
Cux-Ajtzalam first appears coming out of a taco truck parked in front of the brick apartment complex.
“Traffic’s going by,” Belt says. “At one point, you can see people walking by.”
The food truck, which Cux-Ajtzalam was running solo for the owner, blocks any street view as she kneels and gives birth next to the vehicle. “It was amazing no one heard her screams,” he says, before reconsidering since the video has no sound. “Maybe she wasn’t screaming.”
Cux-Ajtzalam then takes trash bags to pick up the newborn without ever touching him. “She doesn’t even look at the child while it’s laying on the ground. Literally scoops it,” Belt says. She pours water from a jug onto the parking lot, washing away the afterbirth. Then she picks up the bags, places them in a small trash can and “goes to the dumpster and drops it there.”
Salazar came by on her way back from taking her wash to the community laundry room. “I walked about 10 steps when I heard the baby,” she recounted recently in Spanish. She saw Cux-Ajtzalam, whom she didn’t know, standing in front of the dumpster and asked if she heard the crying.
Yes, the young woman replied, without seeming alarmed. Salazar began to panic — “Where is it? Maybe it’s in the trash!” she remembers saying — and told Cux-Ajtzalam to get the complex’s manager. When she instead walked away, Salazar called her son in her apartment. He phoned 911 and rushed out to help.
They were the first to see the baby, Salazar untying the bag so he could breathe: “He put his hand out, like ‘thanks.’ I will never forget it.” The 72-year-old house cleaner would become a critical link for police, whom body-camera footage shows getting to the scene moments later. After an ambulance left with the newborn, Salazar told a detective about the young woman she had seen at the dumpster.
Gabriel soon was placed with local foster parents. The prosecutor went to visit him, and he marveled at his tiny head, the soft spot where his skull was still forming, his hands with “the longest little fingers” that always seemed to work their way out of his wrap.
The couple gave Belt a photo that he put on his desk at work: Gabriel in a yellow-striped onesie, hair a fluffy black helmet, mouth a tiny pink bow. The caption: “Treasured beyond measure.”
Police have identified a parent in four of the six abandoned-baby cases in the Houston area this year, though only one other individual had been charged as of mid-December. In the other cases, one autopsy was inconclusive and the second remained pending, so authorities still didn’t know whether either child was born alive.
No matter the circumstances, desperation is a common thread.
The 28-year-old woman who gave birth next to the clothing donation bin in late June had been living at a homeless camp around the corner, a witness said; court records show a lengthy criminal record that includes arrests for assault, prostitution and drug possession.
And the 22-year-old woman whose newborn ended up in the garbage truck’s compactor told investigators she had passed out while showering, then awakened to find she had delivered. When she realized the infant was dead, she said, she panicked and put the body in the trash. A trash crew making its rounds through a neighborhood discovered the body.
“At first, the sanitation guy thought it was a doll. He goes over and touches it and realizes it was a real baby,” said Lt. Mike Santos, a veteran sheriff’s homicide investigator. “When we got there, it’s still in the trash truck. It was horrible.”
Even with a record $32.7 billion budget surplus, state lawmakers here have not committed any money to raise awareness in hopes of preventing babies from being abandoned. Instead, they allocated $165 million this fiscal year to programs offering alternatives to abortion, including crisis pregnancy centers that claim to provide women unbiased guidance but have been accused of deceptive practices. The appropriation included at least $2 million for an initiative promoting adoption, with targeted messages that detractors consider misleading.
The South Texas Republican who authored the safe haven law doesn’t take issue with those decisions. “The problem is, if you do state funding, then you’re tied to it,” Rep. Geanie Morrison explained recently when asked about an awareness campaign. “Better to have it be a local issue.”
By contrast, Nebraska recently updated its safe haven law to add a hotline and $75,000 for educational measure
Thanks for sharing. It helps illustrate that while “Nothing is fully good or fully bad, there’s issues everywhere”, yet not equally so - some places bring on their own problems by virtue of their own obstinacy.
Which despite how I pointed out the link to disinformation campaigns, yet still those could not work unless there was already something existing to tap into. The latter may vary from place to place but like breaking into a home or waging a more traditional form of warfare, eventually it can get gotten around: and yet, the more care and concern is paid to prevention measures the less likely than each incursion will work and thereby the more expensive and longer the whole process takes - which in turn decreases the likelihood that it will work at all (I mean that defenses can be surmounted, but will they is another question altogether).
And this is why I have less and less hope for democracy in the USA as time goes on - unless ranked choice voting could be implemented, we might already be beyond a point where it is fixable and we could just be coasting now until this fiction is discarded entirely by those who hold the real power and don’t see the benefit of keeping the political sphere around any longer. Which would be a tragedy beyond measure and could lead to a very realistic WWIII situation what with all the nukes, but just bc it shouldn’t happen doesn’t mean that it won’t.:-(
That said, Fareed Zakaria seems to hold the exact opposite opinion and that is strongly giving me pause as I think about what he’s saying, as he does know quite a bit more about such things than I:-).
You can even look at Italy now, with Meloni breaking on same-sex parents rights.
As a European, we are well aware Europe isn’t perfect by any mean.