New Safe Haven Baby Box available in Mishawaka

MISHAWAKA, Ind. -- The Mishawaka Fire Department's station number 3 is home to the newest Safe Haven Baby Box.

The box will be the 122nd in the nation.

Located on the west side of the Mishawaka Fire Station on E. Douglas Road, the box will be blessed by area pastors before it's opened to families who need or want to surrender their newborns legally and anonymously with no questions asked.

“The fire department and the city council and the mayor chose this location because they felt that it was the best for a mother to be able to get the anonymity and also the easy access," said Safe Haven Baby Boxes founder Monica Kelsey.

Dave Wood, the mayor of Mishawaka, will offer remarks at the ceremony as will City of Mishawaka Fire Department chief Bryon Woodward.

The event will end with the box being unlocked by founder Monica Kelsey.

This service comes at a crucial time for the state.

With abortion rights seemingly in a state of limbo, more alarms could be ringing in Safe Haven Baby Boxes across the country.

Alarms sound and the door locks when a newborn is placed in one of the climate controlled boxes, notifying emergency personnel who can respond within minutes.

“I don’t truly know and I don’t think anybody truly knows what the impact is going to be, considering we’ve never had a time where we did have Safe Haven but we didn’t have abortion," said Kelsey.

The box being unlocked today will be the 88th for the state of Indiana, where a judge blocked the near-total abortion ban on September 22, just one week after it was put into place.

*In a previous version of this article, we stated the Baby Box is located at station 4. The Baby Box is located at station 3 and we have updated the story to reflect the correct information. We apologize for this error.