Alaska Just Signed a Baby Box Law Built From One Woman's Worst Day

Monica Kelsey was abandoned two hours after she was born in 1973.

She grew up not knowing why, until she met the mother who left her.

That mother's story just helped Alaska sign a law to save the next abandoned baby.

The Police Report That Turned One Woman's Worst Day Into a Movement

Kelsey's adoptive parents were told her birth parents simply could not care for her.

The truth was worse than that.

Her biological mother had been raped at seventeen, according to a police report Kelsey later obtained.

Abortion was illegal at the time, even in cases of rape.

There was no safe, legal way to surrender a newborn either.

So a terrified teenage girl hid her pregnancy, gave birth, and left her baby behind two hours later.

Kelsey grew up, found her birth mother as an adult, and heard that story for the first time.

She turned it into Safe Haven Baby Boxes, a network of climate-controlled bassinets built into the walls of fire stations, hospitals and police departments.

"How blessed am I to have been abandoned but now be saving abandoned children," Kelsey has said.

"It's a God-given purpose."

How Senate Bill 9 Brings Safe Haven Baby Boxes to Alaska

Governor Mike Dunleavy signed Senate Bill 9 on September 9 at a fire station in North Pole, a small Alaska city of about 2,200 people just outside Fairbanks.

First responders and the lawmakers who wrote the bill stood behind him.

Alaska's existing safe haven law already let parents surrender a newborn 21 days or younger with no questions asked.

Senate Bill 9 adds the boxes themselves to that law.

Once the infant is inside, the door seals shut on its own and a silent alarm immediately notifies emergency crews.

Responders reach the box and take the baby to safety within minutes.

That baby is placed with a foster family until an adoption can be arranged.

No one has to give a name, answer a question, or face a courtroom.

Senator Robb Myers, the bill's sponsor, said safe surrender laws exist to help parents in crisis.

"SB 9 puts another tool in the kit to help parents in crisis and keep babies in safe environments instead of the side of the road," Myers said.

Representative Frank Tomaszewski, who carried the bill in the House, called it a matter of compassion.

"We want to make sure that when someone makes the courageous decision to surrender a newborn safely, there are clear, accessible and dependable systems in place to protect that child and get them the care they need," Tomaszewski said.

Texas passed the nation's first safe haven law in 1999 after thirteen abandoned infants were found in one year, three of them dead.

Every other state followed within a decade.

More than 5,000 infants have been safely surrendered nationwide since that first law passed.

Before these laws existed, abandonment caused roughly one in five infant homicide deaths in America.

Today it causes about one in twenty.

The Baby Box Movement Monica Kelsey Built Just Reached Its Twenty-Seventh State

Alaska is now the 27th state to legalize the boxes specifically, not just the broader surrender law.

Kelsey flew to Alaska herself to watch Dunleavy sign the bill.

"We have saved over 300 babies through our Baby Boxes and the Baby Box hotline," Kelsey said.

Her organization describes its mission in five words: saving moms and babies.

All fifty states already let a parent surrender a newborn somewhere, a hospital, a fire station, a police desk.

Only twenty-seven let them do it through a box that requires no face-to-face conversation with a stranger at the worst moment of their life.

Twenty-three states still do not allow the boxes.

On New Year's Eve 2021, someone found a newborn boy abandoned in a cardboard box near a row of mailboxes in Fairbanks.

A note beside him said his family had no food or money to raise him.

He survived only because a passerby noticed the box before the Alaska cold did.

Senate Bill 9 exists so the next baby like him never has to depend on a stranger's luck.

A locked, heated box alerts responders within minutes, every single time.

That option did not exist in 1973 for a raped seventeen-year-old hiding in her parents' house.

It exists now because the baby she left behind grew up and built it herself.

Sources:

• Bridget Sielicki, "Alaska Approves Use of Baby Boxes With Expanded Safe Haven Bill," Live Action, Sep 2026.
• "Founder of Safe Haven Baby Boxes, Herself Abandoned, Shares Her Story and Hope for the Future," Fox News.
• "Safe Haven Laws: A Primer," Lozier Institute.
• "Fairbanks Woman Finds Abandoned Newborn at Intersection," Alaska Public Media, Jan 1, 2022.