Policy an example of misplaced paranoia

Mat-Su Regional Medical Center has informed the Frontiersman it will no longer provide the paper with birth announcements.

The decision, apparently, was handed down from its cooperate owners somewhere Outside where stealing infants using information in the newspaper is a pervasive problem. The decision, according a spokeswoman at the hospital, is based on advice from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

From the perspective here, two of the duties of a paper of record is to record births and deaths.

Now we will have to rely on parents to submit their own birth announcements, which is fine, except for the added responsibility on our part to verify these are true births. When we got them from the hospital, we had assurances of their validity. How would we do that? We would probably have to call the hospital or midwifery to confirm the birth. That’s added work on both ends.

In the past, the hospital allowed the parents to decide if they wanted their child’s entry into the world announced publicly. If not, we got no notification and assumed that was the parents’ wishes.

It’s hard to understand why that can’t continue. If parents are informed on the information packet handed to all prospective parents that there is threat of their baby being stolen, then the parents could act on that information to make a decision about whether to publish their child’s birth.

As a practical matter, conversations with reporters who have been covering Alaska for a number of years came up with no one remembering a recent case here of a baby being stolen from its family. In fact, the Web site for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows 13 missing Alaska children between 1973 and 2008, none were infants when they went missing.

There are, of course, custody disputes, but those kinds of incidents don’t come from reading the name of a baby and its parents in the newspaper.

And of course, we don’t print addresses where the infant will start his or her life.

If you read the national news, the majority of newborns stolen are from hospitals where the babies can be viewed in the maternity ward and chosen by a kidnapper. This has led most responsible hospitals these days to have safeguards of their own that prevent the theft of children. Some use bracelets or anklets or other security devices as preventative measures.

A child being stolen because someone chose an infant by its name from a list of babies in the newspaper is a fairly ludicrous likelihood. Finding them would them be even more difficult in a Valley where many people get their mail at a post office box or live in an area of winding streets and dirt roads that require driving directions so friends can come over for dinner.

But the kinds of decisions the local hospital has made happen when corporations thousands of miles away dictate how a local entity conducts its business. The CEOs in those far-off places have no appreciation of life here any more than we have knowledge of life there, where the suits sit in windowed offices looking out over whatever cityscape they see.

It’s a sad day when families can’t clip out a birth announcement from the local newspaper and tuck it away in a scrapbook or family Bible because of misplaced corporate paranoia.