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As details emerge surrounding last week's abandonment of a newborn near the Washington, D.C.-Takoma Park border by a recent immigrant, local law enforcement officials and advocates are discovering the need to better educate young women and immigrants on Maryland's Safe Haven Law.

Maryland's Safe Haven Law passed in 2002 and allows mothers to leave their newborn babies in the custody of a responsible hospital, fire or police station without being prosecuted. It is designed to protect babies who may be put in life-threatening situations by mothers who fear legal action for giving up their newborn children, according to the Maryland Department of Human Resources. Since an October change to the law, newborns must be 10 days old or younger and unharmed for mothers to be protected under the law.

On Oct. 16, Prince George's County Police arrested Wendy Y. Villatoro, 25, of the 6200 block of Eastern Avenue in Takoma Park after she confessed to giving birth to a baby girl and leaving her in a trash bag in a field. She is charged with second-degree murder and is being held in the Prince George's County correctional facility in Upper Marlboro.

Workers clearing a field on the 6300 block of New Hampshire Avenue discovered the baby at noon on Oct. 12. The baby had been outside for about seven hours and was taken to a local hospital, where it died from exposure to the elements, Prince George's County Police spokesman Henry Tippett said. The Medical Examiner's Office ruled the death a homicide.

Villatoro seems to have been unaware of Maryland's Safe Haven Law, Tippett said.

"I was very, very sad that this woman didn't know about the Safe Haven Law because she could have gone to a police station, fire station, hospital, and just left the baby," said Agnes Leshner, director of child welfare services in Montgomery County.

Infants have the highest adoption rate in the county, she added.

"These babies are ready to be adopted. It's really a gift from heaven," Leshner said. "There are so many people out there looking to adopt."

Montgomery County has had about three or four Safe Haven babies turned over to the state in the past three years, Leshner said.

Prince George's County last accepted a Safe Haven baby in 2007, and the most recent case in which an abandoned newborn died was in 2006 in Riverdale, Tippett said.

Police say Villatoro may have abandoned the baby due to pressures with her male partner over the strain of the baby's impending arrival. That's not uncommon among young mothers, who may face domestic violence or financial pressures and make a similar decision, Leshner said.

Prince George's County Public Schools' curriculum doesn't include information about the Safe Haven Law, but students could learn about it through private sessions with guidance counselors, schools spokeswoman Lynn McCawley said. The school system has no policy regarding how the law is taught, she said.

Montgomery County's efforts to educate the public on the law are focused on faith-based communities and physicians, but a better effort may be needed to educate the immigrant community, Leshner said. But among the few times the county has tracked down the mothers, there has never been an immigrant mother who has abandoned her baby, she added.

Maria Paige, director of services for Silver Spring-based immigrant advocacy group Casa of Maryland, which works in Montgomery and Prince George's counties, said the Villatoro case is rare given Paige's experience that teenage mothers are more likely to abandon their babies than are immigrant women.

"The majority, 99 percent, of our clients, they want to have the children regardless of their economic conditions," she said. "It's very rare, especially when you see for example, coming from the Latino culture, the mother will fight to end to have the child and not to lose the protection to social services."

Domestic violence is an issue among the Latino immigrant community, she added, because mothers are more likely to endure extreme abuses rather than break up their families.

That Villatoro, who police report has lived in the United States for six months, was unaware of the Safe Haven Law or perhaps afraid to inquire about it, is not unusual, Paige said. Many Central and South American countries, for example, don't have similar laws on the books, although it's not unheard of to leave a baby on church steps or at a shelter.

"The culture within the immigrant communities is ‘I'm afraid. I'm not going to ask,'" Paige said. "Definitely there is a huge gap in terms of the education and dispatching the information to young mothers, and everybody in general."

Access to information also poses a problem in communicating with immigrant communities. Among Latinos, there is not only a language barrier, but some immigrants may also be illiterate, Paige added, which makes bilingual pamphlets ineffective. Casa has used drawings in a "popular education" campaign to inform the public about domestic violence.

E-mail Elahe Izadi at eizadi@gazette.net.