'Porcelain Deliveries' a Crisis as Teens Seek to Hide Pregnancies
By Shana Gruskin, Staff Writer
Originally published in the Sun-Sentinel, April 16, 2001
They're called porcelain deliveries.
They're the babies born to panicky teenagers who, alone and suffering acute labor pains, race to the nearest bathroom.
They're the babies who land headfirst in the toilet before being stuffed into a sack or wrapped in a blanket and discarded.
And they're the byproduct, national experts say, of teens steeped in denial and a society that sends mixed messages about sex.
Within the past 10 weeks, South Florida has been stunned by two such deliveries. Both babies were boys. Both were born to teen mothers who hid their pregnancies from their families, their friends, possibly even themselves.
While the general public may be dumbfounded by the brutal act of harming or abandoning an infant, neither case surprises those who work with teens who have unwanted pregnancies.
The phenomenon has struck upscale communities and working class neighborhoods in the Northeast, Texas, Alabama and beyond, prompting a public outcry and enforcement of abandoned baby laws.
And, experts say, the South Florida teenagers appear to match the general profile of mothers across the nation who've been charged with committing or attempting to commit neonatricide—the killing of a child in its first 24 hours of life.
They're young, healthy, unmarried, seemingly drug-free, in school and dependent on their parents. In short, at least to a casual eye, they appear to be typical teens.
That, experts say, is what's so disturbing.
"I viewed it, and I still view it, as a crisis. It's a crisis that needs to be addressed," said Tim Jaccard, a medic with the Nassau County, New York, Police Department who in 1998—after responding to a spate of porcelain deliveries—began a safe haven and mobile crisis program.
Cases differ
The first of South Florida's most recent high-profile abandonment cases hit the news in early February, when 15-year-old Wilmene Florestal of Lake Worth gave birth to a baby boy in her parents' home. The second came six weeks later, when 17-year-old Aimee Lee Weiss of Tamarac also had a boy in her parents' home.
Florestal's infant survived being concealed in a garbage bag and tossed over a fence. He has been placed with child welfare officials. Police say Weiss' baby was suffocated by plastic bags before being placed in a backpack and submerged in a nearby canal. The infant, still zipped in the bag, was found dead five days later by a boy fishing in the canal.
Florestal has been charged with attempted murder; Weiss with an open count of homicide.
Sammy Berry Jr., lawyer for Florestal, said that's where the similarities end.
Florestal, he said, had no clue she was pregnant.
"She's a big girl physically," he said. "She continued to have her period the entire length of the pregnancy. And, based on her age, she did not have any reason to believe that she was, in fact, pregnant."
Berry said Florestal, who comes from a close Haitian-American family, didn't try to harm her baby when she placed him in a black garbage bag.
Instead, he said she poked air holes in the sack. But, knowing her father soon would be back from the pharmacy with medicine for what she thought was a stomachache, she panicked.
"She's a 15-year-old kid who has to make a life-altering decision in less than 15 minutes and was terrified of her parents finding out that she was pregnant," he said.
Weiss was already struggling with a troubled family history, severe depression and an abusive boyfriend when she found out she was pregnant, said her lawyer, Ellis Rubin. He declined to comment further on her state of mind.
Over the following months, Weiss concealed her swelling body in baggy clothes and waited it out.
Inaction common
Inaction in the face of crisis is common among teens who are later accused of hurting their babies, said Annette Phelps, Florida Department of Health's bureau chief for family and community health.
"There seems to be a self-imposed silence and isolation during the pregnancy," Phelps said.
In many cases, that silence and isolation is a symptom of denial.
"It becomes somewhat bizarre to us how that can happen, but [denial] can be the point where they claim, 'I didn't know I was pregnant,'" said Lupe Hittle, of the Child Welfare League of America. "They're serious.
"It's not that they don't realize there are physical changes in their body. It's almost like you detach yourself from what's going on emotionally and physically to the point where even though you see these things happen … you're not acknowledging them."
Jaccard, of AMT Children of Hope Foundation in New York, said pregnancy in and of itself is a traumatic experience, even for adult women who welcome the baby on the way. For a teen—who may fear her parents, mourn her future or dread the public shame of a baby—it can be devastating.
"Now you've got a young woman who hides her pregnancy, cannot let her parents know it, cannot let her friends know about it, … you have immaturity here," he said. "In their minds things will go away."
In an attempt to stem the horror stories, legislators and advocates in dozens of states have sought refuge in abandoned baby laws. Florida's law went into effect last summer, which allows a parent anonymously to drop an unharmed infant who is 3 days old or younger at a fire station or hospital without fear of prosecution.
But some say these laws are poorly publicized. In Florida, the Department of Health was mandated to get the word out but given no money to do so, Phelps said.
And even if the legislation were widely known, it could be useless for women who are too overwhelmed to realize the ramifications of their actions.
"If they are very immature, they may not be able to take advantage of what is being offered because they just don't understand," Phelps said.
The legislation could also cause a backlash in the criminal justice system, Jaccard said.
"We've created an alternative to neonatricide, and in the creation of that, the prosecution now says, 'You had another option. … You had the option of being able to drop that baby off at a hospital or firehouse,'" he said.
"We're finding the sentencing is harsher now."
Education key
Some advocates point to the hot-button issue of sex education as the crux of the neonatricide crisis.
"I happen to think these are preventable tragedies," said Susan N. Wilson, executive coordinator of Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University. "I really lay the blame for them at the feet of adults, not teens. I think that adults have an obligation to help teens prevent this kind of situation. And that calls for really good, sensible, balanced, sexuality education."
Education, advocates say, that comes before teens get pregnant, before they even consider having sex.
But that means promoting honest discussion about sexual activity between children and adults, particularly their parents. And until American society comes to terms with how to approach that powder keg of a subject, any solution likely will remain elusive.
"As a society we're very ambivalent about the issue of sex," said David Landry, senior research associate for the Alan Guttmacher Institute. "We all know we're awash in sexual imagery in the media, but at the same time we don't want teenagers to be having sex outside of marriage. So teenagers are really caught in a difficult situation."
