Abandoned safely as a baby, she wants others to have a chance too

For the first few weeks, she was called Baby Sylvester.

Not a very feminine name for a blue-eyed girl with delicate hands that waved from a cloud of blankets. So the girl’s foster mother started calling her Mariah. 

A few weeks later, Moira Smith, the foster mom, stood quietly at a news conference while TV and newspaper photographers focused their cameras on the baby, just a couple of weeks old. Police and social workers told the media they needed help finding the girl’s mother, who’d abandoned her at a Norfolk hospital. 

Come forward, they asked. They didn’t want to prosecute the mother; they just wanted to make sure she was all right, and they wanted medical information about the baby.

Larry Hill, spokesman for Norfolk police at the time, held the baby for a few minutes and asked Moira if she had any children of her own.

The 33-year-old woman explained she’d had three miscarriages and two tubal pregnancies.

No, she didn’t have a child. But she’d like one.

Feeling bad about maybe stepping on a sore spot, Hill reached over and squeezed her hand. Maybe this one would be hers, he suggested.

It was a small moment that went unnoticed by most.

In the years to come, the little girl’s name, Mariah, stood fast. The foster mother’s wish to adopt came true.

And 17 years later, the two would find themselves asking the same question:  Who brought Baby Sylvester into the world?  

No one knows exactly how many babies are abandoned every year. It’s more complicated to track than you’d think.

What comes to mind for most people are babies left in unsafe public places, like a ditch or trash can or, in a case in January, a cave in Wythe County.

To people who parse such numbers, those are called “discarded babies.” The fortunate ones are found alive; the unlucky die.

In a 10-month period in 1999, 13 babies were found abandoned in the Houston area, a tragic spate that led to the country’s first “safe-haven law.” Since then, every state in the nation has passed one.

The laws allow mothers to leave their babies in safe places, usually fire and police stations and hospitals, without being charged with child abandonment.
In Virginia the law went into effect in 2003 and says that a baby 14 days or younger can be left with employees of hospitals or rescue squads without fear of prosecution.

But the laws don’t have consistent reporting requirements of safe-haven babies. And when discarded babies are counted, it’s often with the overall homicide figures or abandoned children statistics.

The numbers also don’t take into account babies like Mariah, who were born in hospitals and left there by their parents. Some call them “boarder babies.”

Dawn Geras, president of the Save Abandoned Babies Foundation, has another term for them: “Safely relinquished.”

It’s a category Mariah Smith is thankful to fall into.

 
Norfolk Community Hospital, where Mariah was born, no longer exists. It has since been torn down to make way for Norfolk State University buildings.

A story in The Virginian-Pilot nearly two decades ago gave an account of Mariah’s birth.

It was Christmas Eve 1993. A young pregnant woman stepped out of a red pickup truck accompanied by a nervous young man.

She told hospital workers her name was Michelle Sylvester. She called her companion Roy. She said she was 21 and worked at a gas station; Roy worked in construction. She’d been in labor for seven hours, and her water had broken on the way to the hospital. There was no time to give more information.

As she was wheeled to the delivery room, the woman said she wanted to put the baby up for adoption.

When a nurse asked if she had made any arrangements to do so, she said no.

The baby was born 15 minutes later.

It was 7:36 a.m.

The baby weighed 5 pounds, 11¾ ounces.

Such specificity for a girl who would someday want to know so much more.

The mother was taken to a recovery room.

Four hours later, a hospital registrar went into the room to get information for the child’s birth records.

Michelle and Roy were gone.

Two days later, Moira got a phone call at her Virginia Beach home from social services, asking if she would take in a foster baby.

She said yes.

She arrived at Norfolk Community Hospital the next day. Even though she had taken in foster children before, this time she felt particularly nervous. She was shaking. A nurse handed her Baby Sylvester wrapped in a white blanket.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen her open her eyes,” the nurse told her.

As the baby settled into her arms, Moira felt that she was more than a foster child.

Police followed a couple of different leads but found nothing, so they had a news conference on Jan. 12, 1994.

By this time, Moira already felt like the girl’s mother, so she wasn’t happy about the idea. But she dressed her in a pink-and-white outfit with a ruffled hat that framed Mariah’s face.

“We’re hoping to find the mother so the child will not just be a person adrift … a person without roots,” Brent Ramey, a social worker, said at the news conference. “She may be in need of services herself, and we’re interested in helping.”

Mariah slept through the whole thing.

 
The phrase the social worker used – “a person without roots” – is the problem some people have with safe-haven laws.

Although supporters say the laws have saved hundreds of babies, some people in the adoption-rights field question whether the laws encourage people to drop off babies without pertinent information adopted children will someday yearn to have.

At the root of the debate is this: Are the mothers who drop off babies in safe havens ones who otherwise would have abandoned them in unsafe places to die? Or would they have gone through the adoption process?

It’s impossible to know because of the anonymity the law allows.

Dawn Geras understands how important birth information is to adopted children. In Illinois, where she lives, the law has been modified to require a form be offered to the person dropping off a baby at a safe haven. It can be filled out right there or mailed in later.

The form asks for medical information, the parents’ ethnicity, family medical history, and even has a space where the birth parents can write a note to the baby or the baby’s adoptive family.

Geras believes that, if the public were better educated on safe-haven laws, more babies would be saved. There are few studies of mothers who abandon their babies, but some common characteristics have surfaced anecdotally over the years: Young. Single. In denial about the pregnancy. Isolated. Unaware or fearful of seeking out resources that could help them. Unable to care for their babies, emotionally or financially.

Geras and others try and keep count of the number of babies that have been dropped off at safe havens. By her count, 1,862 babies – four in Virginia – have been left in safe havens since the first law was passed in 1999.

Using media accounts, she also tries to track how many babies have been abandoned in unsafe places since 1999: 1,021 babies, including 20 in Virginia.
About half of those died.

 
After the news conference, Moira took Mariah home and waited.

The baby’s parents never came forward.

Moira stopped taking in other foster babies and focused on Mariah. She had waited so long for this baby, she wanted to enjoy every minute.

And she was, in Moira’s opinion, the most beautiful baby ever.

Did Moira wonder whether there would ever be a knock at the door?

“Every day of my life,” she says.

When Mariah was eight months old, Moira and her husband started filling out paperwork to adopt her. The adoption wasn’t final until Mariah was about 1½ years old. Moira’s husband left the family when Mariah was 2.

As Mariah grew up, Moira was as open as possible with her about adoption. For instance, a plaque hung on the wall with “The Adoption Creed”:

“Not flesh of my flesh nor bone of my bone,
but still miraculously my own.
Never forget for a single minute,
you didn’t grow under my heart, but in it.”

Moira read her daughter books about adoption, and whenever questions came up, she answered them the best she could.

One day when Mariah was 13, Moira was driving her and friends to Busch Gardens. The other girls started talking about their heritage. One girl had German ancestry, another Italian.

“Mom, what am I?” Mariah asked.

Moira said her own family was Italian, but that she didn’t know what Mariah’s heritage was because her parents had put her up for adoption.

“Do you know what they looked like?” Mariah asked.

Moira didn’t.

She did, however, know the time had come to tell Mariah her unusual birth story.

 
Moira waited until they were alone.

Even though she had the newspaper article tucked away, she suggested they search together for the article online.

Mariah remembers her reaction after reading the story: “I think one of the biggest questions I had was, 'Why did they do that? What was their reason?’”

Later, when Mariah was in seventh grade, she wrote a poem, titled “Who am I” with a special tribute:  “For my birth mother whoever you are.”

“Sometimes I wonder ... and think 'who am I’
Alone late at night .. is the time when I cry
Did you not love me ... why did you leave
Just a few hours old ... it’s so hard to believe.”

Her questions unfold in cadence: Did her mom ever think of her? Did she cry when she left her, or was Mariah “an awful surprise?” Does Mariah laugh like him, walk like her?

“Do you even care … what I have to say
Or am I just that kid … that you threw away.”

The poem won a contest but didn’t answer any questions.

It wasn’t that Mariah was dissatisfied with her own family; she was very happy. Moira remarried in 1999, and Mariah considers Glenn Askew her father.

And she considers Irvin Bertucci, 17, her brother. Moira’s mother had cared for him as a foster child, taking him in as a baby and adopting him at the age of 4. After Moira’s mother died four years ago, Moira became Irvin’s legal guardian and he moved in.

When Mariah tells friends she was abandoned at birth, the reaction is usually the same: “They look kind of sad for me,” she says. “But I’m happy.”

 
The questions about her birth parents came up again recently, when Mariah wrote a persuasive essay for an English class. Her subject: Why people should have access to their birth records when they turn 18.

It was another fine piece of writing, and it broke Moira’s heart a little when she read it. She reminded Mariah, now a junior at Kempsville High School, that even if she did see her birth records, there wouldn’t be much there. No more than what they already knew from the newspaper article.

Which is why Moira decided to call Larry Hill earlier this year. He was the police officer who held Mariah for a while at the news conference, who talked with Moira, squeezed her hand and said maybe things would turn out right.

Hill, now regional spokesman for the state health department, looked up the 1994 newspaper story to remind himself of the details. He’d been involved in several cases involving abandoned babies during his stint with the police department.

“This is the first time I ever heard back about one,” he said.

Hill, Moira and Mariah met at a restaurant in January and talked for hours. It cheered Mariah to meet a small piece of her past.

When he asked whether she wanted to talk with a reporter about her story, she said yes.

The slim girl with long, straight hair, blue eyes and fair skin wants to know more about her birth family if possible, for reasons she puts forth a bit timidly: Does she have brothers and sisters? What’s her heritage? Her medical history?

Moira, a teacher’s assistant at a Virginia Beach elementary school, is past fearing the knock on her door and wants her daughter to find the answers she’s looking for:

“I look at her every day and know that I’m blessed. I’m not afraid any more because no one can take away the fact that I am her mother; no one can take the love we have for each other. The only thing I worry about is any disappointment.”

What if the birth mother doesn’t want to meet her? What if Mariah never finds her? What if she does, and truth is worse than mystery?

 
Mariah has another reason for telling her story: For all the babies out there like her.

Since she was born, there’s been a string of abandoned baby headlines in the same newspaper where her story ran:

In December of 1996, the body of a child called Baby Hope was found in a plastic bag on a coat hook at a Lillian Vernon mail-order center in Virginia Beach. In March 2002, a newborn girl was found dead in a toilet at First Colonial High School. And in January 2003, a boy, blue and frozen, was found in the woods of a Chesapeake park.

Mariah knows her birth mother – was her name really Michelle Sylvester? – and father – was it Roy? – could have done the same.

But they made sure she was in a safe place before they disappeared in the red pickup truck.

“As I got older, I realized they ended up doing a really good thing, because I ended up being with my mom,” Mariah says. “It took me a while to understand that.”

Maybe her story will reach another woman in the same situation.

And if Mariah never hears from her own birth mother, this could be a way to send a quiet message:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com