I’m going to start this true story with a little preface. I have a neighbor who has three beautiful girls. They desperately tried for a little boy but it wasn’t to be. The reason this is important to know will be obvious later.
I was working a day tour in the middle of the week when a call came in, “unknown medical involving a child.” These are the kind of calls that NO-ONE wants to hear, a trauma involving an innocent child. I was one of two crews that responded. In addition to myself and my partner, both EMT’s, the same of the other crew, two police officers and two paramedics also were responding. Thats about $8000.00 in resources. I ran, literally, into the apartment where the first thing I saw was a young hispanic woman, fully dressed, just standing there, and a police officer who was stone faced and unable to speak. All he could do was point in the direction of the bathroom.

My heart was in my throat as I entered the room, not knowing what to expect. I looked and in the toilet water, still attached to the placenta, was a newborn baby! I grabbed the baby in my arms and ran to the ambulance, screaming for my medic. The little boy was ICE COLD and bloody but still alive. Thank God that muscle memory and training kicks in otherwise I would have been overwhelmed with horror.

I did my best to clean and warm him up on the way to the hospital. They were waiting for us in the ER with a special warming unit and we raced up to the NICU. The other crew wound up transporting the young lady who turned out to be the mother, to the same hospital. She spoke not a word of english so we had to wait for an interpreter. We found out that she was an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, she said that she had been raped and didn’t know she was pregnant.

I went back to the hospital the next day to check on the baby. He was doing fine despite the way he entered this world. The nurses said that the mother had not been in to see him and had NO INTEREST in taking him home. I guess that’s understandable considering how he was conceived, but she took the time to get herself dressed, all the while leaving her baby in the cold dirty toilet. Enter my neighbor, who tried with all her might to have a boy. I took her back to the scene, and she had a conversation in Spanish with the mother and she agreed to start the adoption process, all would have been well.

UNTIL, someone informed the mother that since this baby was born here, he was now an American citizen, and was her ticket to staying in this country. In addition, since the mother was indigent, she was “entitled” to FREE formula, diapers, food, medical care AND housing assistance. Not only that, but the babies $350,000 dollar hospital bill was picked up by Medicaid, (aka, the taxpayers.)

Name another country where an American can give birth, have the baby automatically become a citizen and get taken better care of than they do their own. You can’t, because it doesn’t happen. Something has got to give! The system must be reworked so that these people can be held accountable for their own actions.