On a recent sweltering Sunday afternoon in suburban Mehlville, Missouri, a group of firefighters were jolted into action by an alarm. Rushing to the metal box built into the station’s wall, the firefighters looked inside ... and found a tiny baby girl.

Within minutes, the men had the newborn in their arms. The child’s mother was nowhere to be seen.

The newborn baby girl recovered safely from the baby box at a fire station in suburban St. Louis earlier this month marked the second instance of a child being surrendered and rescued there since that box was installed in 2023.

Resembling a wall-mounted safe on the outside of a building, a baby box allows a mother to anonymously and permanently surrender her newborn by placing the baby into a bassinet in the climate-controlled box and shutting the door. This locks the door from the outside and activates a silent alarm that alerts first responders, who receive specialized training to be able to safely retrieve the newborn from inside the building as quickly as possible.

Laws authorizing “baby boxes” have spread to nearly half of U.S. states since the first box was installed in Indiana a decade ago. The Indiana-based nonprofit organization Safe Haven Baby Boxes (SHBB), which has led the installation of more than 300 such boxes at fire stations, hospitals and other locations throughout the country, counts a total of more than 60 newborns saved so far by parents using baby boxes.

The baby box located at the Mehlville Fire Protection District House 2 in south St. Louis County, the first baby box to be installed in the St. Louis area, was opened in August 2023. Just six months later, in February 2024, a baby girl was safely placed in the box and was later adopted.

According to a press release from the fire district, another baby girl was dropped off in the box on the afternoon of Aug. 10 and was immediately retrieved by emergency responders and taken to an area hospital for evaluation. The baby is now under the care of the state and will be put up for adoption.

“We have to accept, as a community, that this is a bigger problem than maybe we thought. When we put this box in, there were a lot of people that questioned it; there were a lot of people who said, ‘It's a waste, we shouldn't do that, no one's going to use it.’ And I think that we can now say that there is definitely a need," said Mehlville Fire Chief Brian Hendricks, speaking to local news outlet KMOV.

Healthy babies were also recently recovered at baby boxes in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and Mendenhall, Mississippi.

Every U.S. state has laws that allow mothers to safely surrender their newborn children without being prosecuted, though a majority require the surrender to be done face-to-face at a hospital, fire station, police station, or similar location.

According to Safe Haven, a total of 23 U.S. states currently allow mothers to surrender their children anonymously using baby boxes. Laws differ slightly for each state, but in Missouri’s case, newborns up to 45 days old can be surrendered at the boxes.

Encouraging more states to pass laws authorizing baby boxes has been identified by pro-life organizations in recent years as a policy priority. States like Virginia, Mississippi and New Hampshire have newly authorized the boxes in recent years.

Several states are currently considering new laws to allow for the expansion of baby boxes into their states, such as North Dakota, a measure that has drawn support from the state Catholic conference.

New York and Illinois are the most populous states currently considering bills to allow baby boxes; both states currently have none, though Illinois is next door to the state with the most, Indiana.