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Comment by Digit-Al | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :-)

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 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 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 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?

You don’t, but you pay attention when a kid repeatedly shows up in hospital with mystery injuries, which happened in this case. Nobody paid attention until the kid was dead.

You could also have at home unscheduled social worker visits. Intrusive, sure, but it’s a) something you’d be knowingly opting into through adoption and b) likely mostly focussed on early years.

> Nobody paid attention until the kid was dead

Then the question is how often that happens. Is this an outlier, the 0.0001% where all of the signs were missed, and everything failed?

Or does this happen regularly?

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