Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / November 2004

OHIO
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Baby abandoned; for reporter not just a story, it's her life

By Jo Napolitano - Tribune staff reporter
Published November 28, 2004

When I was assigned a story recently about a newborn baby legally abandoned and
found in good health outside an Orland Park fire station, it felt like life had
come full circle.
I thought about his fragility, his defenselessness, the potential that he
doesn't even know he has.
Having been abandoned as an infant myself, the story had a particular resonance
in my heart and mind.
I smiled all day at the thought of him being found safe, warm, alive. I imagine
him as pinkish in color and wrinkle-faced, his tiny fingernails a twentieth the
size of mine.
Since I have no pictures of myself at his age, I'm always intrigued with how
small other people look when they first come into the world.
By the time he was found on Halloween morning, the Orland Park baby was the
10th child to be recovered under the state's Abandoned Newborn Infant
Protection Act, a 3-year-old law meant to decrease infanticide.
The law allows parents to leave their unharmed baby at any hospital, emergency
medical facility, staffed fire station or police station if the child is 3 days
old or less. Proponents say it has saved more than 300 children nationwide
since the first legislation was passed in Texas in 1999.
While it has its detractors, mostly adoptees who feel it gives birthparents one
more outlet to be irresponsible, it has no doubt saved lives.
The Orland Park boy is only the latest example.
Found inside a wicker basket with extra formula and diapers, his belly button
cleaned and cared for, he must have been truly loved by the person who
relinquished him.
I'd like to believe the same was true in my case, although there was no such
law when I came along in 1976.
My abandonment and subsequent adoption has been a part of family lore for
years. While other mothers talk to their kids about what it was like to be
pregnant and give birth, mine tells stories about what it was like to board a
plane for a foreign country and come back with a baby.
It's a story I've told countless times to friends and boyfriends who ask why
this olive-skinned girl bears such an ethnically Italian name.
It's something I've come to be proud of.
Born in Bogota, Colombia, to a destitute young woman, I was abandoned at a bus
stop. Police reports said my birth mother asked a wealthy-looking woman to hold
me while she went home to retrieve my blanket. The stranger waited for hours.
With little information about her other than her description in court records
as a "small, medium-complexioned girl," my imagination has helped fill in the
blanks. I can almost see her handing me off and then walking away, trying not
to cry.
I was eventually taken to a police station. Police tracked down my birth
mother, got her to sign adoption papers, and I spent the next several weeks in
a foundling home.
With little entertainment, I had taken to staring out the window for hours,
sucking on my thumb and index finger on one hand and twirling my hair with the
other, nurses later said.
Weighing only about 6 pounds at birth, I maintained that dangerously low weight
for months.
Officials at the foundling home disguised my malnourished state by bulking me
up--dressing me in multiple layers of clothing--for pictures sent to my
prospective family on Long Island.
But when my unsuspecting soon-to-be mother, father and older brother flew to
Colombia in June 1976, the ruse was discovered. My mother said she fainted when
she undressed me for the first time in Bogota; my legs and arms were
frighteningly thin.
No one was sure that I would survive the plane ride to New York; a family
doctor told my mother to leave me there, fearing I would die in transit. But my
mother says that as soon as she held me in her arms, I was her daughter and
there was no way she was going to leave her baby to die alone.
Besides, she had a plan.
My mother, an Italian-American from Brooklyn, filled me with meatballs and
pasta as soon as I arrived in New York.
It worked.
To the doctor's surprise, I grew into a healthy, energetic and talkative kid.
Whatever attention I may have lacked at the foundling home was made up for in
New York.
Ours was like any family, with joy and heartbreak doled out in equal doses. My
parents separated when I was very small, and my mother raised my brother and me
on her own.
There have been times when I've wondered what life would have been like in
Colombia.
The closest I've come to witnessing that life was when I was a reporter living
on the border of Mexico in south Texas. Visiting towns like Reynosa and
Progreso, their streets dotted with children selling gum or begging for change,
I wonder whether that is what life would have held for me.
But these are things I'll never know, and I'm at peace with that. Still, I've
always felt a kinship with destitute children. Sometimes I feel guilty that I
made it out and they didn't. I know that's why I have always had a penchant to
write about the poor.
While I'm curious about my birthparents, it has never been reason enough for me
to fly down to Colombia and search for them. I feel as though I already have
everything I need: a loving family, a chance to chase my dreams.
I hope the Orland Park boy comes to feel equally fulfilled.
Whatever his future brings for him, I hope he can tell the story of his life
with pride and remember not to define himself by his abandonment.
There is so much more to come.

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