Three years ago, new on the job as a reporter for WPMI-TV in Mobile, Ala., Brooks asked county District Attorney John M. Tyson Jr. whether he would prosecute a mother who abandoned an unwanted baby safely rather than leaving it to die. Today, 29 states have passed "safe haven" laws that grew out of her query.
Brooks had already covered tragic cases of babies abandoned at birth and left to die in woods, canals and Dumpsters as a reporter for television stations in Wausau, Wis., and Chattanooga, Tenn. Her first assignment at Mobile's NBC affiliate was to report on the trial of a mother and daughter charged with drowning the younger woman's healthy, eight-pound newborn son in a toilet. |
