FOR SOME BABIES, A QUEST FOR HOME

It was a sultry summer evening when a 30-year-old woman checked into
Greater Southeast Washington Hospital to have her baby. She had been
using drugs -- crack cocaine and PCP -- during her pregnancy, and now
her contractions were coming fast and furiously, two months early.

Her little girl, later dubbed "Baby K" by a social worker, was born
with a long list of ailments. She weighed 1 pound 14 ounces and was
addicted to crack from Day One. The mother was released a few days
later, but for several weeks, the infant had to stay in an incubator,
where she suffered through a painful withdrawal from drugs. She also
had to gain weight before her mother could take her home.

But the mother never came back. She became part of a disturbing trend
that child welfare advocates have documented in recent years at D.C.
hospitals: troubled mothers who wander into maternity wards, give
birth and then abandon their babies.

In the last 22 months, 61 babies have been abandoned by their mothers
at D.C. hospitals, according to hospital records. Sometimes the
mothers just slip out of the hospital about the time they and their
babies are scheduled to be released. But in most cases, the mothers
leave before their babies are medically ready to be discharged and
then don't return for them.

"This is clearly a major family health crisis," said Vincent C. Gray,
former director of the D.C. Department of Health and Human Services
and now executive director of Covenant House Washington, an
organization for at-risk youths.

Thomas C. Wells, executive director of the Consortium for Child
Welfare, a group that helps find homes for the abandoned babies, said,
"It's incredibly sad to think of the sense of complete hopelessness a
woman must feel when she leaves her child at the hospital without
intending to go back."

The Abandoned Babies Permanency Planning Project is the newest
dimension of the District's child welfare system, an attempt to
immediately find permanent homes for newborn babies abandoned at
hospitals and keep them from being placed in a group home as a
"boarder baby" or languishing in the city's troubled foster-care system.

"That's the most damaging thing the system can do to them," said
Claire Riley, a creator of the project. "These babies need to be moved
from the hospital to the last place they will go."

Under D.C. law, a baby is considered abandoned if the mother doesn't
return or make contact with the hospital within 10 days after the baby
is ready to leave. The reasons for abandonment tie into myriad social
factors -- poverty and desperation, homelessness, criminal
convictions, domestic violence and mental illness -- according to
statistics gathered by the project. But in the great majority of
cases, substance abuse is a factor.

"The mothers don't think like other mothers," said Elizabeth Siegel,
counsel for DC Action for Children and a member of the advisory board
of the abandoned babies project. "These mothers are not maternal.
They're interested only in crack."

Statistics for babies abandoned at area hospitals outside the District
are murky. There is no suburban equivalent to the abandoned babies
project that gathers hospital data on such infants.

Spokesmen for Prince George's Hospital Center, Arlington Hospital,
Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, Washington Adventist Hospital and
Inova Fair Oaks, Fairfax and Alexandria hospitals said no babies had
been abandoned at their facilities in recent memory.

One former drug addict, who asked not to be identified, said mothers
who abandon their babies typically are "going through hell." Another,
Cheryl Hall, 44, a recovering drug addict and former D.C. resident now
living in Maryland, agreed. "When you get on drugs, you only care
about one thing -- getting the drugs. You don't care about anything
else, even a baby."

Hall said she left her children with a relative while she enrolled in
a drug treatment program.

D.C. social workers lament the lack of coordinated services to help
troubled mothers, especially the scarcity of drug treatment programs.
It's a serious problem for many women screened by D.C. General
Hospital social worker Barbara Bowman.

"The city definitely doesn't have enough drug treatment programs for
mothers," Bowman said, especially ones that will allow single mothers
to bring their young children.

Gray said a new plan by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) to allow people
to use Medicaid for drug treatment could be a step in the right
direction. Williams's proposal would increase access to substance
abuse services for 65,000 current Medicaid enrollees and about 39,000
newly eligible people.

Bowman and the nurses at D.C. General see the largest share of the
city's abandoned babies. Since June 1997, 22 babies have been
abandoned at D.C. General, while 16 have been left by their mothers at
Howard University Hospital. An additional 23 babies have been left at
other D.C. hospitals; 13 babies have been abandoned elsewhere in the
city.

"It's heartbreaking," Bowman said. She is rarely surprised, however,
by which mothers leave the hospital without their babies.

Red flags go up among hospital personnel, Bowman said, when a woman
arrives in the maternity ward and has been using drugs, is homeless or
living in inadequate housing, has not had prenatal care, does not
appear to have plans or support systems for parenting the baby, or has
other children in the foster-care system.

But Bowman said there is nothing that she or other hospital workers
can do to force mothers to take their infants home. In some cases,
they believe the babies would be better off if their mothers did not
take them home.

"Children should be in homes where they are loved and taken care of,"
Bowman said.

National figures on abandoned babies are several years old. A 1993
federal study found that over a one-year period, 12,000 infants were
abandoned in hospitals by parents unwilling or unable to care for
them. The study also counted about 10,000 boarder babies.

Federal officials define boarder babies as children younger than 12
months who remain in the hospital beyond the normal date of medical
discharge; they may eventually be released to their biological parents
or put into alternative care. Abandoned babies are defined as those
who are unlikely to leave the hospital with their biological parents,
who are unwilling or unable to provide care.

The District had the third-highest number of abandoned and boarder
babies, behind New York City and Cook County, Ill. (Chicago). Given
its population, the study indicated that Washington had a
disproportionately high number of such abandoned and boarder babies.

The mothers of abandoned children in the District rarely are
teenagers; in the last two years, most were 30 to 39 years old,
according to hospital data.

After a baby is left 10 days beyond his medical discharge date, city
investigators begin searching for the mother.

Sometimes the mother can't be found. City social worker Angie Boone
recounted a recent case in which a mother at Providence Hospital gave
a false name, address, Social Security number and phone number to the
hospital. "It was impossible to find her," Boone said.

If the mother is found and doesn't want her child, social workers ask
her to relinquish her rights to the baby.

Abandoned babies project Executive Director Ava M. Imhof said the
group, created with a $200,000 contribution by the Alexander and
Margaret Stewart Trust, has forged an unusual alliance with city
lawyers, judges, social workers and hospitals. They work together to
quickly find adoptive homes so abandoned infants can begin bonding
with a new parent right away.

In contrast, the 3,253 children now in the District's foster-care
system languish there for an average of 3 1/2 to four years, more than
twice the national average. During that time, children can be bounced
from home to home until officials find them a permanent place to live.

A recent report from a group that monitors the city's foster-care
system indicates that although the city is far behind in placing
foster children in permanent homes, the abandoned baby project is
catching children as they hit the child welfare system and quickly
placing them. Last December, six abandoned babies were permanently
placed with families.

Many of these children grow up with behavioral and medical problems
and special education needs. Baby K, who was exposed to drugs in the
womb, is one of those.

Social workers eventually found her mother. She had given birth to
seven other children she had abandoned, one of whom died. After a
judge ruled Baby K had been abandoned and took away the mother's
parental rights, the infant was transferred to the Hospital for Sick
Children. A nurse there fell in love with the tiny girl, who struggled
to breathe.

Doctors warned the nurse not to get too attached. The child would
never walk, they said. The nurse was convinced that with time and
love, she could make a difference. After special training to learn how
to care for the child, she and her husband took the baby home. The
child's adoption is about to become final.

One day this month, inside a split-level brick home on a quiet Fort
Washington cul-de-sac, a 2-year-old girl in a blue and pink jumpsuit
ran and played. She peeked through the lace curtain, looking for her
daddy to come home. She bounced on her bed near a closet full of
pretty dresses and a pile of colorful toys.

Baby K, whose real name and those of her adoptive parents are being
withheld to protect their privacy, now lives with the 45-year-old
nurse and her family in Maryland, where most of the District's
abandoned babies are placed. She requires 24-hour care and has a long,
hard road ahead of her, including a fourth surgery scheduled for
spring to try to improve her breathing. She wears a small, white,
plastic device on her trachea, but her eyes twinkle as she runs into
her new mother's arms.

"She keeps me going," the mother said. "She's a joy to
raise."

Meanwhile, babies continue to be abandoned at D.C.
General.

A tiny, 5-month-old girl lies listlessly in a swinging chair. She
wears a denim dress with pink, frilly booties and a white bow in her
hair. But all that can't mask the trauma she has suffered -- exposure
to an array of drugs before she was born, and then abandonment by her
mother.

The girl cries out. A nurse tenderly picks her up.

"It's going to be okay," the nurse whispers, kissing the child and
hoping what she says is true.