A Not-So-Safe Haven

Leslie Byers never wanted to stop being a mother. She did, however, want to say goodbye to her daughter before giving up her rights as a parent to the state of Nebraska. After months of agonizing, Leslie had decided to voluntarily surrender custody of Megan, 10, who had been wracked for almost her entire childhood by severe mental illness—an affliction that called for care so intensive and expensive that the Byers family could no longer provide it. The state could, but only if it took over Megan's guardianship. That was how Leslie found herself at a Boys Town outpost in Omaha, watching a team of social workers lead her daughter down the fluorescent-lit hall and out of her care.

As Leslie stood in the hallway, something troubled her: Megan wasn't looking back. Leslie asked for permission to say goodbye, but a social worker told her no. Leslie left, alone. That night, in her new, institutional bedroom, Megan started crying for her mother. A staff member came in to see what was wrong, but with cold comfort to offer. "Your mother can't help you," Megan would later recall the staffer saying. "She's not your legal guardian anymore." The next day, Leslie was back to visit, and Megan had a question for her. Sitting across the table, Leslie's daughter looked at her and said, "They told me you gave me away, Mommy. Why did you give me away?"

It has been more than 12 years since Byers gave up her legal role in her daughter's life through a controversial yet surprisingly common practice called "custody relinquishment." But the story of how and why she did has taken on a freshly painful significance for her in the last two months. It is one that Byers, now the president of the board of the Nebraska Family Support Network, is hearing over and over again from other parents. In September, Nebraska enacted its now-infamous Safe Haven law, allowing parents to leave children up to age 18 at hospitals throughout the state without going through the more involved custody relinquishment process. Thirty-five kids, mostly preteens and teens—five of them from other states—were dropped off before the state legislature hastily convened to amend the law on Nov. 21. In some cases, these families' circumstances—their tragedies and unmet needs—were the same as those that had driven Byers to give up custody of her own daughter. Many of the teens were suffering from mental illness and behavioral problems; they had depleted their families' financial and emotional wells. Two of the families sought out Byerses' help. "The crisis that these children and families were in was one where the parents had gotten to the point of saying, 'Oh my God, my child is going to end up in jail or worse, dead'," she says. "They felt they had no choice but to do this."

Nebraska's amended Safe Haven law—which went into effect Nov. 22, a day after the state's Republican Gov. David Heineman signed off—now applies only to babies under 30 days old. Many child advocates applaud the fix; they say parents of older children should never use safe-haven laws, lest they scar their children with the stigma of abandonment. But the new formulation of the Safe Haven law does nothing to address the desperation that drove some of the original Safe Haven parents—from Nebraska and elsewhere—to drop off their children. As national attention to Nebraska begins to dim, some worry that momentum for helping those parents and others like them is in danger of fading, too.

On Tuesday, a 75-person task force of state senators, Safe Haven families and child-welfare advocates—including Leslie Byers—met at Boys Town's national headquarters in Omaha for the first of three daylong sessions to discuss changes to the state's system of family services. A second session is scheduled for today. It's a starting point. But nothing official will happen until at least January, when the state legislature reconvenes. At that point, the Safe Haven law will no longer be a pressing issue, and any follow-up legislation will need a fresh gust of political wind to pass—let alone be properly executed and funded. Nebraska's history of enacting such services at full capacity is spotty at best, and the current economic crisis won't make that challenge any easier. What will the state do for its most desperate parents, if anything? Will other states, whose own laws had families crossing state lines into Nebraska seeking relief, follow suit? And will that be enough—or will there be many more families like the Byers, so demoralized as to believe the best thing they can do for their children is to give them up?

Megan Byers's story begins much like those of some of the recent Safe Haven kids. Well before she was 10, Megan was "a danger to herself and others," says Leslie. She cut herself with razor blades, broke windows and threw plates and made threats on her mother's life. "This wasn't a child in a temper tantrum who wouldn't go to bed when you wanted her to," says Leslie. "This was a child who would fly into a rage, and you're praying to God the police get there in time. Meanwhile, you've got your two other kids huddled in the basement. You get to a point where you say, 'If I don't take the step of giving up this child, I'm afraid I'm going to be going to a funeral'."

Leslie and Steve Byers tried a range of parenting tactics to see if they could help Megan calm down. They talked to priests. They negotiated with Megan's school. They sought out psychiatrists and tried six months in a residential treatment center. Nothing seemed to help, and they began to wonder if there was anyone left to call. "If you have a burglar in your home, you call 911. If you have a medical emergency, you can go to the doctor," says Steve. "But with a child with mental illness, parents don't know who to contact. We didn't know what role this agency or this person or that person played or what kind of authority they had. We were groping in the dark."

By the time Leslie and Steve decided they could no longer care for their daughter, they were right—they had no financial way to do it. The Byers were not poor by any measure, but they did not have enough money to keep Megan in the regular, intensive, inpatient treatment that her psychiatrists had recommended; at $1,000 to $2,000 a day, very few families would. Steve and Leslie Byers had health insurance for themselves and their children, but that was no help. In less than a year, between April 1995 and March 1996, Megan was hospitalized seven times, swiftly exceeding her parents' insurance cap of $70,000 for such services over a lifetime. The Byers resorted to calling the police when Megan's illness, eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder, got out of hand. "The officers came, and in their mind it was a domestic violence situation, so they manhandled her and handcuffed her," says Leslie. "She was taken to the ER, given a shot of Thorazine, and sent home. That was the only form of treatment we had left. They just knocked her out. They treat dogs better than this."

Unwilling to tolerate the ER "treatment" and unable to pay for anything better, the Byerses asked one of Megan's doctors what to do. He told the family he "didn't know how we were going to make it," says Leslie, "but that in the end, we would have go to through the courts." There was, it turned out, one program that could pay for the services Megan needed: Medicaid. But the Byerses' income far surpassed the threshold to qualify. The only way to get Megan on Medicaid was to make her a ward of the state through the controversial process called custody relinquishment—one that to some degree mirrors the first version of Nebraska's Safe Haven law. Fourteen states do not allow custody relinquishment, in which parents voluntarily turn over their children to the government. In at least 25 other states, according to the Judge David L. Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the practice is used or considered by "as many as 20 percent of families of children with serious emotional disturbance." Other reports suggest that many children across the U.S. have entered the child-welfare or justice systems solely for the purpose of getting mental-health care; a 2003 report by the General Accounting Office identified 12,700 such kids in 19 states alone.