What Do You Want for Next Christmas?

'Dear Texas, I would like a dumpster baby.'

Courtesy of Missing Mom

Really, no, really — just joking — but really… Nah, I’m just messing with you. It’s not a problem in the United States of 2025. It’s just my sick, irreverent sense of humor, folks. There isn’t a rising incidence of babies being left in Dumpsters in Texas. Nonetheless, I am messing with you because there is a problem with a rash of babies being left in Dumpsters in Texas — and probably too in other states.

The call came in on the fire truck’s radio on a blazing hot summer afternoon: “Baby in a dumpster.”

“It didn’t specify alive or dead,” Patrick Pequet remembers.

He and fellow firefighters arrived within minutes, pulling into the rear parking lot of an apartment complex in the southwest quadrant of this sprawling city. Police were already there, as were the several residents who had frantically summoned them, standing near a blue dumpster crowded by discarded boxes, scattered trash and garbage bags.

In one of those bags, a baby had been crying. Now, only silence (Baby in a Dumpster).

A decade ago in Texas, seven babies were abandoned in or near Dumpsters. This year, so far, there have been 18. Texas is next to last in women’s health and reproductive care funding. More women in Texas have no health care than in any other state. Abortion in Texas for 99.9 percent of women is illegal. Governor Greg Abbott passed a law requiring hospitals to track how much money is spent on undocumented patients. Fearing they will be deported, many immigrant women in need avoid hospitals.

In the case above, the baby left in the Dumpster survived and was named Gabriel. The mother of the baby was a teenager from Guatemala.

Christian-nationalist Republicans across the country are finding the new reality of Dumpster babies an untidy consequence of the draconian abortion laws made possible when Trump’s SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. Democrats in Texas have introduced “baby boxes,” which are situated near fire stations. The purpose of the boxes is to give desperate mothers the option of putting their newborns in these drop-off boxes — almost like Amnesty boxes. Leave it there, and you technically have not abandoned it. Conservatives are against it because they feel it will lead to more widespread abandonment. It seems they would rather the babies be left in dumpsters.

There is no end to the ignorance and evil of the Christian right and Republicans in general. By overturning Roe v. Wade, tens of thousands of unwanted babies are being born across the country. Some babies will be unfortunate or fortunate enough to end up in Dumpsters. Some will die, and good families will adopt others. Many babies will be born into homes that not only couldn’t afford them but didn’t want them. Parenting is hard enough, but when forced to care for a baby you can’t afford and don’t want, being a good parent becomes much more complicated.

Like everything else conservatives ruin in our nation and the world, the consequences of their poorly considered abortion bans will come back to haunt our society. These consequences might even result in some of us being killed one day by these unwanted children.

When will they learn that the God they proclaim to love gave us a brain for a reason?