THOUSANDS OF CRACK NEWBORNS STRANDED

Epidemic Of '80s Gaining Even More Momentum Now

WASHINGTON - In the late 1980s, as the crack epidemic reached a peak in
America's largest cities, thousands of newborns were stranded in urban
hospitals, abandoned by mothers too sick, too addicted to care for them.

Since then hospitals, child-protective agencies and social workers have
been working together to attack the problem with intervention programs
funded in part by Congress under the Abandoned Infant Assistance Act.

But after a decade of such effort, the numbers of "abandoned" and "boarder
babies" in hospitals have increased substantially, according to a study for
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The number of boarder babies - infants medically ready to leave hospitals
but stranded for lack of suitable homes - has jumped 38 percent, from 9,700
in 1991 to 13,400 in 1998.

And the number of abandoned infants - those being treated but who are
unlikely to go home with their biological parents - has risen 46 percent,
from 11,900 in 1991 to 17,400 in 1998.

Those numbers, in a draft copy of the study obtained by Knight Ridder,
appear likely to cause concern among children's advocates and health-care
professionals.

"This is incredible human waste," said Gretchen Buchenholz, executive
director of the Association to Benefit Children, a New York-based advocacy
group that has sued to fight what she calls "the warehousing of babies."

The hospital babies had been difficult to place because of their reputation
for having special medical needs. But in fact only 28 percent of boarder
babies had serious medical problems in 1998. Some 45 percent of abandoned
babies had medical conditions in 1998. About two-thirds of all the babies
were exposed to drugs, but only a small fraction tested positive for HIV.

The study indicates that while a few big cities apparently have made
progress, the problem of babies left in hospitals has persisted in most and
has spread to smaller cities.

While drug abuse continues to be a significant problem among pregnant women
in Kansas City, hospitals and social service agencies have been working
together since the crack cocaine epidemic of 10 years ago to assure that
children of addicted mothers have safe homes, said Alice Kitchen, director
of social work and community services at Children's Mercy Hospital.

As a result, mothers identified as drug abusers are gotten into treatment
programs or assigned to caseworkers often before their child is even born,
she said.

"It's handled swiftly, and there are rarely delays," Kitchen said. "We
don't have abandoned babies as such because we have resources."

Places that in 1991 had no identifiable problem are trying to cope with
burgeoning caseloads of abandoned and boarder babies, the
as-yet-unpublished study found.

"I think there had been a sense that the boarder baby problem was
disappearing. We're under an illusion," said researcher Elyse Kaye, who
headed the study.

Others questioned the report's findings.

At Project Babies, a community-based organization in Newark, N.J., that
works with substance-abusing women to preserve and reunify their families,
officials were wary.

"It raises a lot of questions; how the numbers have been counted; whether
the numbers are accurate. Now it would look like New York has decreased and
Newark has tripled," said Karen Towns, deputy executive director. "Are they
indicative of reality?"