After 38 years with The Wall Street Journal and despite serving as Executive Washington editor for that paper, not to mention his prominence as a regular on CNN's "The Capital Gang," it is to be expected that Al Hunt will strike out once in a while strictly on the basis of not reporting the facts. (There's no point in trying to assess Hunt's score on ideology, given the fact that he's the resident "liberal" of a paper with a consistently "conservative" philosophy.)

Sadly, Hunt goofed in an area - children's issues and adoption - where he's got a deep and abiding personal interest, he's an adoptive parent and is supportive of adoption. Hunt has often hit homers. Most notably, Hunt was on former President Clinton's back about having a Department of Health and Human Services that tolerated race-based placement policies for children receiving federal funds. And Hunt was supportive of foster care reforms undertaken by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Hunt's folly came in an Aug. 21, 2003, "Politics & People" column in The Wall Street Journal entitled "No Safe Haven." "Safe Haven" refers to those laws, sometimes also called "Baby Moses" laws which allow women, or someone they give their babies to, to have an option other than unsafely abandoning their newborns - or killing them. The essence of the laws is that women can anonymously put their children in the arms of someone at a Safe Haven, or leave their babies at a Safe Haven site - usually a hospital or fire station - without fear of being prosecuted for child abandonment. The first such bill, in Texas, was signed into law on June 3, 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush. Since then, 44 other states have passed various versions of the Texas law.

Maybe Hunt's problem has something to do with the fact that President Bush and Texas Republican Geanie Morrison, a GOP State Representative from Victoria, were godparents of the movement to pass these laws. Whatever the reasons, Hunt decided to write a column Aug. 21 about a "pocket veto" of a law nearly unanimously passed by the Hawaii legislature months ago. What prompted Hunt to drag this dead bill out and prop it up is unknown. There's certainly little debate at present in any of the remaining state legislatures about such bills.

At any rate, Hunt decided to lionize Gov. Linda Lingle, the Democrat who is Governor of Hawaii, for having vetoed the bill sent to her. Dismissing the other 45 governors who did not veto similar legislation as boobs who can't resist bills with appealing titles, Hunt asserts that not only do the laws do more harm than good but that they are failures.

Hunt's authority for the claim that the laws do more harm than good is a biased report ("biased because it does not include data from New York's Safe Haven law, for example) from a New York City advocacy group called the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute. The Institute is a group headed by Adam Pertman, an adoptive parent who was for years a reporter for the Boston Globe - a biography that gives the Pertman instant credibility, being both a certified liberal journalist and an adoptive parent.

Hunt's claim that the laws do not work is based on an April 25, 2002 factually-challenged article from the Houston Press, an "alternative weekly" published in Houston, TX. Hunt, citing that paper, claims that "In the first two years, only five infants were legally abandoned, while almost a hundred newborns were illegally discarded in the state."

Hunt should have Pertman, or some assistant, find out what the official story is in Texas, as I did. He would have learned, had he called the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services (TDPRS), that the picture in Texas is not one that most people would call a failure. Judy Hay, a spokesperson for TDPRS in Houston, says that in 2002 there were two babies saved through Baby Moses law relinquishments, and no babies were found dead. The previous year, three babies had been abandoned - one died and two were saved, but the circumstances of their abandonments did not comply with the Baby Moses requirements.

Hay's counterpart at the state level in Austin, Geoff Wool, Director of Public Information for TDPRS, says his Department does not attempt to collect data on or report on Baby Moses relinquishments. What is available are data for all babies that fall within the age range of the Baby Moses law, including babies presumably like those saved in Houston in 2002, and who are found alive. And those numbers do not show the law to be a "failure" unless declining abandonments is equated with "failure." Abandonments, even after Rep. Morrison expanded the law in 2001 to babies 31-60 days of age, went down every year. In 2000, the first full year after the law passed, there were 54 live babies abandoned in Texas. In 2001, with an expanded pool of babies, it was 43 babies. In 2002, it was 38 babies. A near one-third drop in abandonments from 2000 to 2002 hardly seems like a failure.

So what's behind this opposition to laws that demonstrably are saving babies and reducing the incidence of baby abandonment? There are two major possibilities.

The first and most likely culprit is the Houston Press article which claimed that nearly 100 babies were "discarded" in the first two years after the law was passed. It's true that 97 babies met the Texas definition of having been abandoned, but they were all live babies and not "thrown away," the first definition of "discarded" in the dictionary. If Hunt and Lingle both believe that 97 babies were unsafely abandoned, in ditches and dumpsters, and that many of them died, despite the existence of the new law, and only five babies were turned in under the new law, they might reasonably conclude that the law was a failure.

The other possibility is that notwithstanding the fact that Safe Haven laws save babies' lives and keep desperate women from doing jail time for unsafe abandonment or infanticide, such laws are seen as some sort of threat. The clues that this may be the cases are present in Hunt's column, and in the statements from the Donaldson Institute.

Clue number one is that when Hunt mentions the options available to desperate women, he leaves out unsafe abandonment or infanticide. One can only surmise this is because mentioning infanticide comes perilously close to having to talk about partial-birth abortion or other aspects of "choice." "Choice" is just not the ideological Baal of the nine Democratic Presidential candidates.

Clue number two is the complaint that some of the laws "allow virtually anyone to drop off newborns at the designated spots." That's true. It seems reasonable and humane not to require a woman who has delivered at home and who may hemorrhage to have to get in a car or somehow find her way to a hospital to drop off her baby when the father of the baby, some relative, or a friend can do it.

Clue number three is the claim that "a disgruntled relative" can force a woman to use the Safe Haven process. Four years after the first law passed, I have yet to see a news story about any such thing happening. And a woman was pressured, the woman could tell authorities she was acting under duress and she's get her baby returned to her.

Clue number four is the concern that the rights of biological fathers are compromised. As if a man who was unaware of a pregnancy, unsupportive for nine months, and absent for the labor and delivery would suddenly develop a sense of responsibility - or as if an abandoned woman is going to turn over her baby willingly to such a man..

Clue number five is the focus on health records. Of course some laws set up ways to get this information, if women choose to share it. That happened recently in a Safe Haven relinquishment in Illinois. But the fact is that a live baby without health information is a better situation than a dead baby with a file full of maternal and paternal medical histories.

Clue number six is the absence of genealogical information. Translated, this means that Safe Haven placements do not involve the kind of sharing of identifying information, and possible relationships between the biological parents and prospective adoptive parents, that has come to be seen as "best practice" by the social work establishment. In a world where privacy and confidentiality is constantly being eroded, it is no surprise that so-called "open adoption" is now seen as the "modern" - indeed the only - reasonable choice for agency placements just as it has usually been the approach taken in adoptions arranged by attorneys. Pertman is an adoptive parent through "open adoption," and is a zealous promoter of that approach.

The biggest clue comes toward the end of Hunt's column, when he criticizes Safe Haven laws as "an easy and cheap cop-out." Instead, Hunt wants "...more confidential counseling for at-risk pregnant teens about parenting, prenatal care and adoption, including fathers...."

Such a recommendation, and the spending it would require for the social workers and others who might be enlisted in the task, might have some positive impact - although current spending and decades of same-old, same-old attempts to talk to women have not been particularly productive - if it were only "teens" who are at risk of unsafely abandoning or killing their babies.

The fact is that what little is known about the women who may possibly benefit from Safe Haven laws suggests that concentrating on counseling for teens and the biological fathers they may choose to identify would miss a large part of the population at risk. In the Washington, D.C. area, several of the babies - and two of the dead babies - were born to women with problematic immigration status, and a third was born to a couple who are members of minority groups where there was a cultural barrier to admitting to a non-marital pregnancy. In other areas of the U.S., anecdotal reports indicate that women using Safe Haven procedures are older, often with other children, and usually unable to cope with the financial and other stresses of parenting another child.

At this point, 45 states with 97 percent of the population of the U.S. have some form of Safe Haven or Baby Moses law. As information from several states, most notably Alabama, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, suggests, babies are being saved. Perhaps, once Al Hunt, and the Governor of Hawaii for that matter, review the official data that is available from Texas, they may decide to reverse themselves. If they do so, they will be welcome to the grassroots movement that has promoted and improved these laws since 1999, and they can help move legislatures in the remaining jurisdictions, Alaska, D.C., Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nebraska and Vermont, to do, as "Dr. Laura" counsels, "the right thing."