By Michael Tavoliero
Alaska Watchman’s piece on baby boxes confronts a specific horror: a newborn left outside in an Alaska winter. That danger is real. The article notes HB 64 expands safe-surrender options through secure, climate-controlled baby boxes to keep panic and secrecy from becoming a death sentence. If lowering that final barrier, fear, saves even one life, it is a tool worth taking seriously.
But the article’s power, its focus on shocking and rare cases of infant abandonment, risks narrowing the public imagination. The last twenty years of infant loss in Alaska is not defined by abandonment (as few as 3 by some records, Alaska Public Media, 10/13, KTOO, 01/22, and Anchorage Police 11/24).
Alaska’s broader reality is quieter and larger. Infant death overwhelmingly comes from neonatal complications, congenital conditions, and from post-neonatal causes like sudden unexpected infant death. These deaths do not spark the same immediate outrage as a baby found outside, but they fill the real ledger of loss. If we only respond to the most visible tragedy, we protect our feelings more than we protect Alaska’s children.
Then there is the other ledger, upstream, quieter, and year after year numerically dominant: abortion. Alaska’s own reports put induced terminations in the low thousands annually. Regardless of one’s moral framework, any serious “life and death” discussion must admit the largest volume of life ended in Alaska is not a newborn left in the cold, but lives ended before birth. For some, that comparison will be morally decisive. For others, it will be contested. But it cannot be ignored if the conversation is to be about reality rather than rhetoric.
Alaska’s modern abortion regime has two distinct roots: statutory legalization and later constitutional entrenchment.
Statutorily, Alaska was an early mover. In 1970, Alaska joined a small handful of states that repealed major anti-abortion restrictions and permitted abortions more broadly often described at the time as allowing abortion “on request” (typically prior to viability and, in Alaska’s early framework, with a residency requirement). That legislative shift matters because it places Alaska among the pre-Roe states that liberalized abortion law through state action rather than federal compulsion.
The second foundation is judicial and constitutional.
In Valley Hospital Association v. Mat-Su Coalition for Choice (1997), the Alaska Supreme Court struck down restrictions by a quasi-public hospital by treating abortion as protected under Alaska’s privacy clause (Article I, Section 22). Yet the opinion’s “chicken-and-egg” schizophrenia remains: it talks as if reproductive rights are fundamental, as if abortion is constitutional, and then as if it exists only because it is folded into privacy: three rationales for the same result. This move ridiculously locks the issue into constitutional interpretation rather than ordinary legislation.
In terms of “levels” by trimester, Alaska’s official Induced Termination of Pregnancy (ITOP) reporting organizes gestation by weeks, but the picture converts cleanly. In the last 20 years, Alaska Department of Health records disclose over 29,000 induced terminations occurring. The week-bands show that 26,000 to 27,000 were at or before 13 weeks, 1,700 to 2,300 occurred at 14–20 weeks, and very small number later than that.
When the State opens the door to meandering morality, when it treats fundamental duties as negotiable, reframes evil as “complex,” or replaces clear norms with procedural loopholes, human nature rarely rises to the occasion. It adapts downward. People tend to do what is permitted, then what is tolerated, and eventually what is normalized. The boundary of conscience shifts to match the boundary of law; responsibility is externalized (“the system allowed it”), and the exceptional becomes routine.
In that environment, tools like baby boxes are not merely compassionate conveniences, they are emergency guardrails erected because we already know what human beings do when shame, fear, or desperation meets moral ambiguity: they look for the quiet exit, the hidden solution, the path of least resistance. A society that wants fewer tragedies cannot only build softer landings after the fall; it must also restore moral clarity so fewer people approach the ledge in the first place.
A sober takeaway is this: baby boxes are not the answer; they are an answer to one specific kind of failure: the moment a frightened or coerced parent believes there is no safe exit. In that sense, the Watchman article is right to treat baby boxes as a emergency off-ramp intervention: they do not solve the upstream crisis, but they can prevent a worst-case outcome.
If Alaska wants to be serious about the sacredness of human life, the ethic must be comprehensive, not selective. It should include baby boxes as a harm-reduction safeguard. It should also include relentless work on the dominant causes of infant death, prenatal care access, maternal support, neonatal resources, and safe-sleep education. And it should include a clear-eyed confrontation with why so many pregnancies end in abortion, and whether Alaska’s institutions are offering women in crisis anything more substantial than slogans.
The moral test is not whether we can be shocked by a newborn abandoned in winter. The test is whether we can build a society that makes that act less likely, makes infant death less common, and makes choosing life, before and after birth, more possible for the desperate, the poor, and the frightened.
