A New Mexico community is celebrating this week after a mother anonymously surrendered her newborn to a safe haven baby box at a fire station.
Hobbs, New Mexico Fire Station 1 received a notification on Saturday indicating an object was placed in the town’s new baby box. Firefighters quickly responded to the scene where they found a baby boy safely tucked into the incubator.
“This is exactly why we put the baby box in the Hobbs Fire Department Station One, and they just couldn’t be happier with the end result – a safe baby taken to the hospital and healthy,” Mark Doporto, interim fire chief for the Hobbs Fire Department, told NewsWest 9.
Doporto praised the person who anonymously dropped off the child — presumably the boy’s mother — for using the box “for the best outcome of this child.”
Baby boxes are climate-controlled receptacles designed to “prevent illegal abandonment” by offering struggling mothers “a last resort option” to secretly give up their newborns.
These boxes are often demonized by corporate media as a conservative tool to further the war on abortion. In reality, thousands of babies are alive today thanks to safe haven protections like baby boxes.
The Hobbs baby box is the first in New Mexico to be used. Its success has prompted other cities like Portales, Carlsbad, and Roswell in the state to look into installing their own safe and secure surrender spaces.
“It’s just a tremendous victory for the City of Hobbs and our county as a whole, a tremendous victory,” Doporto said.
The recent rescue is especially encouraging for Hobbs residents; the city spent the last year and a half reeling after a local teen tossed her newborn baby away like garbage in 2022. Hobbs opened the safe haven incubator after the 18-year-old was caught on camera throwing away her baby boy in a dumpster.
The child barely escaped freezing to death on the January day thanks to a few curious passersby who found him wrapped in a pink bath towel among trash bags. His mother was eventually arrested and sentenced to 16 years in prison since she refused to take advantage of the state’s safe haven laws or a local pregnancy center and instead opted for child abuse and attempted first-degree murder.
“If there’s one baby that’s saved because of this baby box, it’s definitely a win,” former Hobbs Fire Chief Barry Young told NewsWest 9 in October 2022.
Mere weeks after the city made plans to open a baby box, the Hobbs city council unanimously voted to become a sanctuary city for the unborn. The vote served as a direct rebuke to New Mexico’s Democrat Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, whose radical abortion agenda sought to use the town’s proximity to Texas to expand profitable baby-killing operations.
