Abandoned baby raises new questions about the state's safe haven law

He was abandoned at birth; now a North Texas baby is at the center of a custody fight between two families. The case is a rare twist on the safe haven law, also known as the Baby Moses law.

After a rash of abandonments led to infant deaths in the late 1990s, Texas became the first in the nation to pass a state law legalizing abandonment. Under the law, as long as the baby is less than two months old and there are no signs of abuse, parents can anonymously drop them off at a hospital, fire station, or freestanding emergency room. 

Without names or relatives, the state can move quickly to terminate rights and start the adoption process.

That's how Vincent and Lisa Blow met the boy they thought would become their son. He was just days old, still in the hospital, when the Texas Department of Family Protection and Services placed him with their family in November. 

"I cried going up in the elevator," Lisa Blow recalled. "I was telling Vincent, 'he's ours, this is ours!' And even when we introduced ourselves to the nurses, it was like, 'oh, you're the parents.'"

The Blow family is no stranger to the adoption process. They fostered three boys and were in the process of adopting one of them at the time. 

"I've always wanted to adopt. My sister did fostering to adopt with the same agency," said Lisa Blow. "[Vincent Blow] is a social worker; his mom worked for CPS, so a lot of family members have experience with fostering, adopting, and things like that." 

The couple says they originally told the adoption agency that any child placed with them needed to be at least six weeks old. That way, the child could go to daycare while they worked. 

"When we decided to do a newborn, we only really made that commitment because it was a Baby Moses," said Lisa Blow. "Through all of our trainings and talking to others, we learned that Baby Moses, that's a for sure thing — that baby is going to be yours."

"I was told by three different workers that they were like, 'oh, he's yours,'" Vincent Blow said. "Mom surrendered rights, and that's it." 

The baby has a birth defect that could require surgeries well into his teens. Vincent Blow took six weeks off from work to care for him as the family spent the holidays getting to know its newest member. 

Adoptive family stunned as birth mother seeks custody months later

But February brought news they never expected: DFPS officials said the birth mother had called and wanted her baby back.

"I fell on the ground and just started crying," said Lisa Blow. "I kept asking, like, 'how can this be? How can this be?' I mean, we've had him for three months! How can this be?"

The Blows say DFPS officials told them the biological mother is a college student who gave birth at a hospital with the father present. According to the Blows, the mother and father both left the baby there the next day, and it wasn't until February that the birth mother told her parents about the child. The Blows say the maternal grandparents are now seeking custody.

The news brought a new round of questions for the Blow family. 

"From what we've been told, it's really her parents pushing, and her parents not knowing that he even existed," said Lisa Blow. "So we can't help but wonder, what kind of relationship do they have? Was she not comfortable to share that she was expecting? And if they hadn't found out, would she even want him back?" 

Rare safe haven dispute

Texas tracks abandonment cases by fiscal year. Since 2018, the number of legal and illegal abandonments has fluctuated from year to year. How many of those parents return for their children is unknown — the state does not track that information. When the I-Team requested it, we were told it would cost $451 and take eight weeks to design a program to find out.

A DFPS spokesperson would only say that she hadn't heard of it happening often. Family law attorney Rick Mitchell agrees. 

"I don't know the percentages, but it's got to be 1 in 100, maybe more," he said.

While Mitchell is not involved in this case, he has represented parents in other Baby Moses cases. He says generally, if Baby Moses relatives come forward before an adoption is finalized, they would have the same rights as in any other regular adoption case. 

"The grandparents were lucky to find this child and the adoptive parents are really unlucky that it happened," Mitchell said. "There's no good answer, right? Somebody's going to have to lose in this thing and someone's going to have to be heartbroken."

The Baby Moses statute does not address family reunification because the parent is "voluntarily delivering" the child to safety with "no intent to return."

Lisa Blow says they tried appealing directly to the woman who originally walked away from her baby. 

"I wrote her a letter," she said. "And I just told her in the letter that when we got him, we were told he was ours. And that's why we named him. And I told her that the decision you made, I respect that. And I did tell her that, if you would like us to continue to parent him, we will include you in his journey forever. 

"We would never not want him to know his biological family. But you know, he's ours, and we just felt like there was nothing else for us to do."

A DFPS official declined to comment on the case, citing privacy concerns. The next court hearing to determine custody is April 16.