They adopted a baby who might’ve been abandoned. Now they fight for others
When a newborn was dropped off last month at a Safe Haven Baby Box in a St. Louis suburb, Kayleigh Wasmer loved that another child had been saved.
But the Liberty mom of three couldn’t help but feel a tinge of sadness, seeing yet another city providing a life-saving service that she and her husband have tried for more than two years to get in the Kansas City area. Still, the closest Safe Haven Baby Box — where mothers unable to care for their newborns can safely drop them off, no questions asked — is in Savannah, Missouri, about an hour away.
“Other people are getting them, why is our city not?” Wasmer said. “There’s a huge need for it, but it just hasn’t gotten done.
“It makes me wonder … if we had those boxes, how many babies could have been saved?”
In April, after a council member contacted Wasmer about the need, the KC City Council passed a resolution directing the City Manager to “research and report back” about the feasibility of installing these Safe Haven Baby Boxes in fire stations across the city.
Six months later, the wait continues.
But Nathan Willett, the city council member who sponsored the resolution and has worked with Wasmer and others to get the baby boxes in Kansas City, said he heard from the City Manager’s office earlier this month. Five locations have been determined as good spots for three boxes, Willett said.
The next step is to choose the exact locations and shore up funding, which will be roughly $20,000 to $21,000 for each box and installation. No funding has been appropriated at this time.
“They’re coming,” said Willett, who represents the 1st District. “I would love it to be quicker, but you have to identify locations that work, that are safe, that meet the standards.”
The hope is to get the boxes in the Kansas City area this spring, Willett said.
Sherae Honeycutt, a spokeswoman for the city, spoke to City Council earlier this year about the need for these baby boxes. She said she began advocating for them two years ago.
“Safe Haven Baby Boxes provide a safe, anonymous and compassionate way to protect a child while preserving a mother’s dignity in an unimaginable moment,” Honeycutt said then. She also told the council that at age 16 she ran away from foster care and knows what it feels like to be “powerless and afraid.”
“This is not just about saving babies — it’s about meeting people with empathy and giving them a real option when they have nowhere else to turn,” Honeycutt said.
Since 1999, all 50 states have enacted laws that allow parents to give their babies up for adoption anonymously. These safe haven laws allow parents to relinquish their parental rights within a time limit that differs state to state, according to the National Safe Haven Alliance.
Laws have been tweaked in many states, including Missouri and Kansas, allowing parents to surrender their babies by placing them in these temperature-controlled bassinets, often at fire stations. The boxes have automatic alert functions that contact emergency responders when a child is left inside so they can be retrieved quickly.
Jessi Getrost, executive assistant with Safe Haven Baby Boxes, said the program is in 23 states and another three have passed laws that allow it to operate there. To date, the Indiana company has blessed 390 boxes since its inception in 2016, and 70 infants nationwide — including three in Missouri – have been surrendered, Getrost said.
Once babies are surrendered they are given immediate medical attention and taken to the hospital. Then, they are handed over to child protection services in each state and placed in an adoptive home.
“It’s really exciting for us to know the program is working,” Getrost said. “That we’re able to save lives.”
In the Kansas City area alone in recent years, authorities have responded to multiple scenes where babies have been neglected, found dead or seriously injured. In February of last year, police responded to a home where a mother told officers she mistakenly placed her 1-month-old baby in an oven instead of her crib.
Wasmer wants to make sure mothers in crisis have more options.
“I’m terrified that there’s going to be another abandoned baby,” Wasmer said. “My concern is the babies and just getting the boxes in as fast as possible.”
‘Kind of like fate’
Wasmer first heard about Safe Haven Baby Boxes a few years ago, after seeing the organization on social media. She hoped Kansas City could bring the program to the metro area.
Then came Abbott, her and her husband’s youngest of three children. And the couple’s push for the program in the KC area became even greater.
Abbott was born in June 2023. And his biological mother, who is from the same small town where Wasmer grew up, was homeless.
She had told family members and friends, Wasmer said, that she was unsure of how to care for the baby.
“And she had thoughts of leaving him in a wooded area near her encampment,” Wasmer said.
But the expectant mom was experiencing pain and was taken to the hospital where the little boy was born.
The mother and Wasmer had been Facebook friends for years. And Wasmer’s family was known in the small town as kind and loving.
Soon after the little boy was born, his biological mother reached out to Wasmer.
“I’m guessing that’s how she called me, through Facebook Messenger,” Wasmer said. “She told me she had a baby and that she would like my husband and I to adopt him.”
As soon as Wasmer told her husband, Wes, who is a Kansas City police officer, she said “he didn’t even think twice.”
“He said, ‘Absolutely, go to the hospital and meet him, but also, more importantly make sure she’s OK.’”
Wasmer said she first saw her son when he was less than two hours old.
“I don’t know if she knew that we were big on the Safe Haven Baby Boxes,” Wasmer said. “I have no idea why she called us and asked us to adopt him.”
Their family of four became five.
“It was something that we didn’t even really see coming,” Wasmer said. “We were perfectly content with our two beautiful children. And then Abbott came and it was like seamlessly, he fit into our family.
“To me, it’s no different than me birthing a baby and bringing him home. “
Two months after Abbott was born, Wasmer started reaching out to officials about getting Safe Haven Baby Boxes throughout the city.
“I reached out to everybody for about two years,” she said. No one responded, but she kept going.
In April, she posted on social media about the need for these boxes. That’s when Willett — who Wasmer said has been a ‘Savior’ with this project — reached out.
“It was just kind of like fate put this in our hands,” she said. “We were asked to adopt him, and then that kind of lit a fire with me and my husband really wanting to get the boxes in Kansas City.
“We know the importance and the need of them, because our son was almost left in the woods.”
Boxes ‘saving a life’ in Missouri
In August 2023, the first Safe Haven Baby Box in Missouri was installed at a station in the Mehlville Fire Protection District. Since then, eight more boxes throughout the state have been installed. With others in the works.
Six months to the day that the baby box was blessed at the station in Mehlville — an unincorporated community in St. Louis County — Fire Chief Brian Hendricks got a text on his phone.
That text, which arrived during the day, alerted him that the door to the baby box had been open. He soon learned that it wasn’t a test. A baby was inside.
“It just fills me with nothing but just happiness,” Hendricks said, referring to the success of the program in his district. “I wish that we would have done it sooner, because it’s just knowing that you’re able to be there for a woman in crisis who is trying to deal with these difficult situations, and the alternative is unthinkable.
“For me, it’s just being able to provide them with a safe option, you know, no shame, no blame, really anonymous.”
In August, Hendricks got another text. Another baby was placed in the box. Two babies in two years.
A month later, a fire station in O’Fallon, Missouri, northwest of Mehlville, received an infant in its Safe Haven Baby Box. That surrender happened less than two months after the station’s box was blessed.
Andy Parrish, an assistant chief with the O’Fallon Fire Protection District, said the word is starting to spread about the program and he anticipates more cities and fire stations getting involved.
“This is saving a life, is what this is,” Parrish said. “That’s how we look at it.”
In the coming weeks, the Mehlville Fire District will get its second Safe Haven Baby Box.
“You just hope that these mothers understand the gifts that they’ve given these babies,” Hendricks said. “I mean, this is not a situation where anybody would have to wonder what’s going to happen. I mean, these babies go to loving homes.
“And you know, it just makes me feel incredibly lucky that I’m able to be a small part of it.”
Meanwhile, Wasmer is eager for Kansas City’s first box. Each time she sees a post from Safe Haven Baby Boxes about another baby “being surrendered” she said she tears up.
“Every time I’m like, ‘That baby is going to get what Abbott gets,’” Wasmer said. “That baby is going to get a family that is loving and caring.
“There are a lot of women who can’t have babies, or a lot of families you know, that can’t conceive babies naturally, and they get to have that joy that they probably would never, ever get to experience.”
This story was originally published October 26, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
