Everything about this story is so satisfying, that if I read it in a lesser source I would be doubting it.
The person finding the baby was the person who eventually adopted him. The judge asking the guy to adopt the baby was the same judge that performed the wedding of the couple doing the adoption. Just so many great details.
Many of us could easily imagine, once chance puts us in the position of the person who can’t walk past, taking a concerned interest in the outcome and, realising that the baby would go into the care system, stepping up and doing the massive step of talking it upon ourselves to provide that home?
Imagine, perhaps. Stepping up and doing it, that's more difficult. Then consider this scenario: two young men taking in a child when they did not have financial or social security. I'm not sure what the situation was like for gay men in NYC at the time, but it would be years until they could legally marry. Heck, they weren't even living together at the time. That takes a whole lot of bravery.
(I will acknowledge that it is not impossible to imagine. I have known people who have adopted the children of strangers after reporting their family for abuse.)
> I have known people who have adopted the children of strangers after reporting their family for abuse.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
― Fred Rogers
God bless the woman who felt they had no other choice & give them help rather than punishment. We will never know the circumstances but we can obviously assume they weren't very much better than the baby's to have done this. Nobody doing something like this out of disdain for the child would have carried it to delivery (regardless of their stance on abortion).
At least in NY State, babies up to 30 days old can be left for care by the state.
> New York State's Abandoned Infant Protection Act allows a parent to abandon a newborn baby up to 30 days of age anonymously and without fear of prosecution, as long as the baby is abandoned in a safe manner.
> A parent is not guilty of a crime if the infant is left with an appropriate person or in a suitable location and the parent promptly notifies an appropriate person of the infant's location. A hospital or a staffed police or fire station are examples of safe and suitable choices.
> A person leaving an infant under this law is not required to give his or her name.
I think every state has a similar type of safe haven law these days. This one for NY first came out the same summer as the story in the article starts. This and similar stories were making a lot of news around the time and people were really interested in trying to help. It doesn't make things perfect, there are e.g. still occasional situations where a person isn't in their own control or in a sane state, but these kinds of changes did help thousands of cases since.
I think a lot of school sex ed programs/health classes have started teaching this to kids as well. Not all of course, as with most things sex ed.
Had you considered this was not in the mother’s control, was not her choice, and/or that this was a better outcome for the child and she knew that?
He was not left in a bin or dumpster. This is not an ideal way to give up a baby for adoption, but don’t assume he was unwanted, or unloved: you don’t know - or seem able to imagine - the full story.
Personally I would be more worried that the woman that had just given birth received the appropriate medical attention and help with whatever circumstances made her feel that she had to abandon her child.
In response to a heartwarming story you did not read, you made an account on this website to advocate for harshly punishing a child or young woman acting under extreme duress for a crime committed 26 years ago?
In the US anyway there are places you can drop off a child "no questions asked". Often fire departments or (I think?) police stations. It's to prevent this exact thing.
> Not everything has been easy. When he was a teenager, he had a lot of questions about his birth mother. He wanted to put up posters in the subway, and we would notice him looking at strangers’ faces to see if they looked like him. He’s made peace with the situation now, though.
Plenty of adopted folks have been curious about birth parents as teens and adults. Not sure elsewhere around the world. In Canada, the adoption records used to be closed but have been gradually. There have been cases that the birth parents did not reply.
I find this story slightly odd. I'm not trying to suggest it's not true, I have trust in the Guardian not to print falsehoods; but do they really offer abandoned babies to just anyone in America?
Here in the UK, I used to work with a guy many years ago who was trying to adopt. He and his wife had to go through months and months of vetting and paperwork to be allowed to become adopted parents. You basically have to prove that you are fit to be a parent. And yet in this story a court basically says "hey, you wanna adopt this baby you found? Yeah? Here you go."
Sounds like this guy I knew should have moved to America. He and his wife could have just pulled up to an orphanage, said "I'll take that one", and been parents immediately - if this story is anything to go by.
The judge didn’t ask him if he wanted to adopt there and then in that precise second and that was that.
The judge asked if he was interested.
Perhaps the judge asked this knowing that the circumstances showed this was a caring man who had the child’s best interests at heart and had demonstrated through actions - and described through testimony we have not heard - his feelings towards the child when finding him.
They did not just get given the child. There was still a process. They visited the child in care. They filled in paperwork. They were vetted. They were asked if they’d like to look after the child over Christmas - not forever, not straight away. The process took a little time, it just took a lot less time than if the child entered care and they had to find other adoptive parents.
The most important variable to identify in this situation is capacity to love and care for a vulnerable child. Financial stability and good character still need to be there - and it sounds like they were identified before the adoption was completed - but the head start was there.
My understanding is there's a very - superficially weird - sort of logic at play with this though.
Basically if we're going to take a child not presently abandoned or in danger, and place them with someone, we need to know damn well that we're not worsening the situation for the child.
But if you have a child who was already abandoned and in danger, and you start looking after them unprompted, the situation for the child has already improved and almost any other action will worsen it - i.e. it's generally accepted that children being wards of the state is a worse outcome in almost all circumstances compared to a dedicated parent.
A comparable example I suppose would be the question of what's the best strategy for seeking help if you're lost: basically, statistically, it's approach the first person you see and ask for help. Because the occurrence rate of predators in the population is low, so the first person you see is unlikely to be one. But if you stand around for a while looking like you need help, well now you're obviously a target and the chances of someone who approaches you intending ill-intent rises.
I guess, if you really think about it, a lot of the safety checking is to make sure that the person trying to adopt is not a predator who will abuse the child. In this case, someone who was like that would not have called the police and handed the child in, they would have just taken the baby to abuse; so his handing in the child to the authorities automatically ticked the "not a child predator" box. Thanks for helping me to think about this in a different way :-)
> A comparable example I suppose would be the question of what's the best strategy for seeking help if you're lost: basically, statistically, it's approach the first person you see and ask for help.
Ah yes, from the Paul Graham article on security. I bring that one up myself from time to time :-)
> The process actually ended up being surprisingly quick, thanks to a short-lived pilot program that was meant to cut through red tape and quickly place healthy, abandoned infants in permanent homes.
> ... do they really offer abandoned babies to just anyone...?
NO - the 2nd sentence of the article says that the adoptive-father-to-be had "a good job in social care". In the same jurisdiction as the baby was found.
So he's not some nice-guy rando who called 911 - he's a vetted and experienced professional within the same social care system as the judge, who that judge might easily have looked into before "asking if he had any interest".
EDIT: Yeah, in the course of the court hearing where he was testifying about having found the baby, the judge was probably sizing him up, and asking him questions well beyond his "briefly witnessed, called 911" role.
You can search for articles and you will find more info dating from the year 2000.
IIRC, there was a lengthy court “battle” to allow them to adopt, as the parents are a gay couple and that was not as openly accepted at the time. That’s why this story was so big back then and is still relevant today, it was a unique case.
It's changed over the years and depends quite a bit on the state, but generally family court prefers placing wards of the state with birth parents if they're alive and known and legally able to care for a child, and if not, then either kin or "fictive kin," which is any stable adult that already has a pre-existing relationship with the child. If a child is completely abandoned and has no known family, then whoever found them is probably the best thing going all else being equal.
But no, it is not generally that easy anywhere in America. My wife and I tried for six years and it never happened. Texas completely privatized foster care licensing years back, so standards can be pretty arbitrary. Some agencies are thinly-veiled scams requiring you to purchase books or parenting classes from the founder.
I feel adoption is either super easy or super hard. No one claims the system is fair. It can also be the article skipped on these difficulties for a better headline.
> It can also be the article skipped on these difficulties for a better headline.
Thanks for the reply. That is certainly a possibility that I didn't think of. I guess they could possibly have thought that if he was caring enough to take time out of his day to call the police and look after the baby until they arrived that he might potentially make a good parent as well.
Yeah, it's a short article. There are obviously lots of things it doesn't go into. I doubt the judge was like "want this baby? Pick it up from the orphanage, here's your receipt."
I wonder what kind of vetting process the couple went through in the US as well. The story may over-simplify the process.
In Canada, my family knew a couple who tried to adopt a child in the decades ago because of infertility. The vetting process and the paperwork from the government agency was "audacious". They said the amount of red tape was so much to the point that the fertile couples would not adopt locally.
Back in the day, adopting a child from China and Romania was easier than adopting locally.
I think there is a difference between adoption through the foster system and adoption before the child gets into the foster system. Im not sure about the laws around it, but the judge may have more discretion in the latter case.
My extended family has interacted with this side of the law in my area. From what I can gather, there are two primary goals for everyone involved: get the child to live with their (non-abusive) parent(s) if at all possible, or, failing that, get them into a household that wants them.
Its possible my experience is biased from the fact that it everyone involved was family.
I can’t confirm or deny the Guardian story, but I do personally know someone who found a small baby in a bus in Kenya and preceded to adopt and raise her.
Man, in the UK you can’t even get a frigging cat without having several inspections of your home and interviews to confirm that you will be a fit “parent”.
I mean, I’m all for safeguarding in principle - but it evidently doesn’t bloody work.
Inspiring to see the couple accomplish this and in the early 2000s no less. Wishing them all the best. If you haven't already, watch the animated short film[1] by Zombie Studio. It was my introduction to this case before reading the article.
I just watched the short and I'm not a fan. I understand that they are trying to make a point and the presentation is great, but the way they paint the social worker and the judge (who, based on the story, seem to be a cool dude) feels so far away from the facts as to be entirely made up.
Also, the Vimeo web player in Android sucks so much. This is in no way related to the previous point, but I couldn't not bring it up.
I see what you mean, but ultimately the video shows both the social worker and the judge were on the couple's side, despite the first impression... The social worker was painted as this very bureaucratic person who follows the rules to a tee, while still being sympathetic to the couple's situation. And the judge was painted as the intimidating figure with the final say, who eventually rules in favor of the couple and gives the child a permanent home. I agree with the other commenter who said the story was too good to be true, so the film making some artistic decisions for dramatic effect doesn't sound too bad.
Interesting. On this page, the one dad is wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. But in a photo on The Guardian article that same dad is wearing a New York Mets hat. I guess people can change after all.
I know a lot of people like to dump on Firefox, but a number of paywalls, including the Guardian one, completely disappear when you use it. For those that don't, some of them disappear if you use reader mode.
there are a lot of sites that do that, especially in germany. and it annoys me to no end because i believe it is actually illegal. at least that's how i understand it. i might be wrong but i believe that tracking cookies must always be optional, paid or not.
You may be surprised to learn that there is more than one person on HN, and also that among the group of people made up of more than one person, some of them have different opinions than others.
Everything about this story is so satisfying, that if I read it in a lesser source I would be doubting it.
The person finding the baby was the person who eventually adopted him. The judge asking the guy to adopt the baby was the same judge that performed the wedding of the couple doing the adoption. Just so many great details.
There is an excellent children’s book about their story. It’s hard to read to my kids without getting teary, tbh.
https://www.petermercurio.com/our-subway-baby/
Many of us could easily imagine, once chance puts us in the position of the person who can’t walk past, taking a concerned interest in the outcome and, realising that the baby would go into the care system, stepping up and doing the massive step of talking it upon ourselves to provide that home?
Imagine, perhaps. Stepping up and doing it, that's more difficult. Then consider this scenario: two young men taking in a child when they did not have financial or social security. I'm not sure what the situation was like for gay men in NYC at the time, but it would be years until they could legally marry. Heck, they weren't even living together at the time. That takes a whole lot of bravery.
(I will acknowledge that it is not impossible to imagine. I have known people who have adopted the children of strangers after reporting their family for abuse.)
> I have known people who have adopted the children of strangers after reporting their family for abuse.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” ― Fred Rogers
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God bless the woman who felt they had no other choice & give them help rather than punishment. We will never know the circumstances but we can obviously assume they weren't very much better than the baby's to have done this. Nobody doing something like this out of disdain for the child would have carried it to delivery (regardless of their stance on abortion).
At least in NY State, babies up to 30 days old can be left for care by the state.
> New York State's Abandoned Infant Protection Act allows a parent to abandon a newborn baby up to 30 days of age anonymously and without fear of prosecution, as long as the baby is abandoned in a safe manner.
> A parent is not guilty of a crime if the infant is left with an appropriate person or in a suitable location and the parent promptly notifies an appropriate person of the infant's location. A hospital or a staffed police or fire station are examples of safe and suitable choices.
> A person leaving an infant under this law is not required to give his or her name.
I think every state has a similar type of safe haven law these days. This one for NY first came out the same summer as the story in the article starts. This and similar stories were making a lot of news around the time and people were really interested in trying to help. It doesn't make things perfect, there are e.g. still occasional situations where a person isn't in their own control or in a sane state, but these kinds of changes did help thousands of cases since.
I think a lot of school sex ed programs/health classes have started teaching this to kids as well. Not all of course, as with most things sex ed.
Had you considered this was not in the mother’s control, was not her choice, and/or that this was a better outcome for the child and she knew that?
He was not left in a bin or dumpster. This is not an ideal way to give up a baby for adoption, but don’t assume he was unwanted, or unloved: you don’t know - or seem able to imagine - the full story.
Personally I would be more worried that the woman that had just given birth received the appropriate medical attention and help with whatever circumstances made her feel that she had to abandon her child.
In response to a heartwarming story you did not read, you made an account on this website to advocate for harshly punishing a child or young woman acting under extreme duress for a crime committed 26 years ago?
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Quite often in these cases the mother is an abused minor themselves.
What are those safe ways?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_hatch
In the US anyway there are places you can drop off a child "no questions asked". Often fire departments or (I think?) police stations. It's to prevent this exact thing.
Where does it say the baby was in a dumpster or bin?
> Not everything has been easy. When he was a teenager, he had a lot of questions about his birth mother. He wanted to put up posters in the subway, and we would notice him looking at strangers’ faces to see if they looked like him. He’s made peace with the situation now, though.
Felt this deeply.
Plenty of adopted folks have been curious about birth parents as teens and adults. Not sure elsewhere around the world. In Canada, the adoption records used to be closed but have been gradually. There have been cases that the birth parents did not reply.
I find this story slightly odd. I'm not trying to suggest it's not true, I have trust in the Guardian not to print falsehoods; but do they really offer abandoned babies to just anyone in America?
Here in the UK, I used to work with a guy many years ago who was trying to adopt. He and his wife had to go through months and months of vetting and paperwork to be allowed to become adopted parents. You basically have to prove that you are fit to be a parent. And yet in this story a court basically says "hey, you wanna adopt this baby you found? Yeah? Here you go."
Sounds like this guy I knew should have moved to America. He and his wife could have just pulled up to an orphanage, said "I'll take that one", and been parents immediately - if this story is anything to go by.
The judge didn’t ask him if he wanted to adopt there and then in that precise second and that was that.
The judge asked if he was interested.
Perhaps the judge asked this knowing that the circumstances showed this was a caring man who had the child’s best interests at heart and had demonstrated through actions - and described through testimony we have not heard - his feelings towards the child when finding him.
They did not just get given the child. There was still a process. They visited the child in care. They filled in paperwork. They were vetted. They were asked if they’d like to look after the child over Christmas - not forever, not straight away. The process took a little time, it just took a lot less time than if the child entered care and they had to find other adoptive parents.
The most important variable to identify in this situation is capacity to love and care for a vulnerable child. Financial stability and good character still need to be there - and it sounds like they were identified before the adoption was completed - but the head start was there.
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I suggest your LLM radar is a bit out of tune.
My understanding is there's a very - superficially weird - sort of logic at play with this though.
Basically if we're going to take a child not presently abandoned or in danger, and place them with someone, we need to know damn well that we're not worsening the situation for the child.
But if you have a child who was already abandoned and in danger, and you start looking after them unprompted, the situation for the child has already improved and almost any other action will worsen it - i.e. it's generally accepted that children being wards of the state is a worse outcome in almost all circumstances compared to a dedicated parent.
A comparable example I suppose would be the question of what's the best strategy for seeking help if you're lost: basically, statistically, it's approach the first person you see and ask for help. Because the occurrence rate of predators in the population is low, so the first person you see is unlikely to be one. But if you stand around for a while looking like you need help, well now you're obviously a target and the chances of someone who approaches you intending ill-intent rises.
I guess, if you really think about it, a lot of the safety checking is to make sure that the person trying to adopt is not a predator who will abuse the child. In this case, someone who was like that would not have called the police and handed the child in, they would have just taken the baby to abuse; so his handing in the child to the authorities automatically ticked the "not a child predator" box. Thanks for helping me to think about this in a different way :-)
> A comparable example I suppose would be the question of what's the best strategy for seeking help if you're lost: basically, statistically, it's approach the first person you see and ask for help.
Ah yes, from the Paul Graham article on security. I bring that one up myself from time to time :-)
https://nypost.com/2025/07/04/us-news/nycs-famous-subway-bab...
> The process actually ended up being surprisingly quick, thanks to a short-lived pilot program that was meant to cut through red tape and quickly place healthy, abandoned infants in permanent homes.
Curious to know about the pilot program!
> ... do they really offer abandoned babies to just anyone...?
NO - the 2nd sentence of the article says that the adoptive-father-to-be had "a good job in social care". In the same jurisdiction as the baby was found.
So he's not some nice-guy rando who called 911 - he's a vetted and experienced professional within the same social care system as the judge, who that judge might easily have looked into before "asking if he had any interest".
EDIT: Yeah, in the course of the court hearing where he was testifying about having found the baby, the judge was probably sizing him up, and asking him questions well beyond his "briefly witnessed, called 911" role.
You can search for articles and you will find more info dating from the year 2000.
IIRC, there was a lengthy court “battle” to allow them to adopt, as the parents are a gay couple and that was not as openly accepted at the time. That’s why this story was so big back then and is still relevant today, it was a unique case.
It sounds like the judge had a lot of discretion in this case and used their discretion for a speedy adoption.
It's changed over the years and depends quite a bit on the state, but generally family court prefers placing wards of the state with birth parents if they're alive and known and legally able to care for a child, and if not, then either kin or "fictive kin," which is any stable adult that already has a pre-existing relationship with the child. If a child is completely abandoned and has no known family, then whoever found them is probably the best thing going all else being equal.
But no, it is not generally that easy anywhere in America. My wife and I tried for six years and it never happened. Texas completely privatized foster care licensing years back, so standards can be pretty arbitrary. Some agencies are thinly-veiled scams requiring you to purchase books or parenting classes from the founder.
I feel adoption is either super easy or super hard. No one claims the system is fair. It can also be the article skipped on these difficulties for a better headline.
> It can also be the article skipped on these difficulties for a better headline.
Thanks for the reply. That is certainly a possibility that I didn't think of. I guess they could possibly have thought that if he was caring enough to take time out of his day to call the police and look after the baby until they arrived that he might potentially make a good parent as well.
Yeah, it's a short article. There are obviously lots of things it doesn't go into. I doubt the judge was like "want this baby? Pick it up from the orphanage, here's your receipt."
I wonder what kind of vetting process the couple went through in the US as well. The story may over-simplify the process.
In Canada, my family knew a couple who tried to adopt a child in the decades ago because of infertility. The vetting process and the paperwork from the government agency was "audacious". They said the amount of red tape was so much to the point that the fertile couples would not adopt locally.
Back in the day, adopting a child from China and Romania was easier than adopting locally.
I think there is a difference between adoption through the foster system and adoption before the child gets into the foster system. Im not sure about the laws around it, but the judge may have more discretion in the latter case.
My extended family has interacted with this side of the law in my area. From what I can gather, there are two primary goals for everyone involved: get the child to live with their (non-abusive) parent(s) if at all possible, or, failing that, get them into a household that wants them.
Its possible my experience is biased from the fact that it everyone involved was family.
I can’t confirm or deny the Guardian story, but I do personally know someone who found a small baby in a bus in Kenya and preceded to adopt and raise her.
It sounds like Public Transport Baby Adoption is an evolution of the Cat Distribution System: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cat-distribution-system
Man, in the UK you can’t even get a frigging cat without having several inspections of your home and interviews to confirm that you will be a fit “parent”.
I mean, I’m all for safeguarding in principle - but it evidently doesn’t bloody work.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y0xz424v1o
Individual examples of the process not working doesn't mean it's overall a bad process. If you expect perfection, no adoption would ever occur.
I’d say raping your adopted kid is not just a little slip up, and to brush that with “nobody’s perfect” is… well, you do you.
How do you prove with absolute certainty that a given person will never rape anyone?
Inspiring to see the couple accomplish this and in the early 2000s no less. Wishing them all the best. If you haven't already, watch the animated short film[1] by Zombie Studio. It was my introduction to this case before reading the article.
[1] https://vimeo.com/1092249009
I just watched the short and I'm not a fan. I understand that they are trying to make a point and the presentation is great, but the way they paint the social worker and the judge (who, based on the story, seem to be a cool dude) feels so far away from the facts as to be entirely made up.
Also, the Vimeo web player in Android sucks so much. This is in no way related to the previous point, but I couldn't not bring it up.
I see what you mean, but ultimately the video shows both the social worker and the judge were on the couple's side, despite the first impression... The social worker was painted as this very bureaucratic person who follows the rules to a tee, while still being sympathetic to the couple's situation. And the judge was painted as the intimidating figure with the final say, who eventually rules in favor of the couple and gives the child a permanent home. I agree with the other commenter who said the story was too good to be true, so the film making some artistic decisions for dramatic effect doesn't sound too bad.
Having gone through the foster parent licensing process in another state I'm shocked at how fast things moved in this case.
Are you in California?
No.
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I insist you listen to them tell it: https://thisislovepodcast.com/episode-33-on-the-way-to-dinne...
Interesting. On this page, the one dad is wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. But in a photo on The Guardian article that same dad is wearing a New York Mets hat. I guess people can change after all.
https://archive.ph/aE9Xg
Guardian is not behind a paywall?
Here in the UK, you have to either pay a subscription fee or accept ALL of their tracking cookies in order to read their articles.
I know a lot of people like to dump on Firefox, but a number of paywalls, including the Guardian one, completely disappear when you use it. For those that don't, some of them disappear if you use reader mode.
And archive.is joins their users into botnets
I’ll take the cookies
got any reference for that claim?
It has been discussed on HN pretty frequently since it started happening: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/search-engines/archive...
Wikipedia has deprecated them as a result
Or just toggle JS on their site mate
there are a lot of sites that do that, especially in germany. and it annoys me to no end because i believe it is actually illegal. at least that's how i understand it. i might be wrong but i believe that tracking cookies must always be optional, paid or not.
Isn't that the choice people on hn claim to want to have? Let me pay for journalism and not be tracked please.
You may be surprised to learn that there is more than one person on HN, and also that among the group of people made up of more than one person, some of them have different opinions than others.
That's a good heartwarming story to start the weekend :)
Reminded me of the recent, and excellent, Canadian tv series Empathy, with the main character is found in a garbage can by his adoptive parents.
Anywhere but HN, I'd have written this off as clickbait and kept scrolling. Amazing story
Well does Kevin read Hacker News?
A great, beautiful story! :)
What a lovely story, what a lucky family to have found each other!
> "Now, Kevin is an incredible young man and we are tremendously proud of him. He works out of state as a software developer"
Half-expecting a comment from him here on HN
[dead]
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This made me want to listen to 2Pac.