Stories of infants abandoned by their mothers have haunted us ever since Yocheved placed her baby in a basket on the River Nile to escape a royal decree that the little boy be killed. We wish every baby Moses would be so generously rescued. We wish for the happy ending.

So it’s understandable that, when faced with a few, heart-wrenching modern-day tales of abandoned babies, public officials would rush in to try to help. The trend began in Texas in 1999, after a dozen babies were abandoned in Houston in less than a year, and lawmakers adopted a “safe haven” law to encourage women to leave their unwanted babies in a hospital or other safe location.

In the four years since, the idea has swept like summer wind through the bulrushes. Forty-two states now have safe-haven laws; Pennsylvania’s was just enacted in February.

To what good, we might ask.

The Newborn Protection Act did no good in the middle of the night last Sunday at B Street near Allegheny Avenue in Philadelphia, when a newborn was found abandoned in a diaper bag on a roadway outside a warehouse, within miles of some of the finest hospitals in the nation.

Since no state funds have been dedicated to promote the new law, it’s no wonder that the infant’s mother did not know she could remain anonymous and avoid prosecution if only she had relinquished the child at a hospital. (As it is, she will not be charged.)

But the rush to enact safe-haven laws suffers from more than a lack of publicity. With the noble intention of saving lives, the laws turn a practice regarded as primitive – leaving a baby in a basket on a doorstep – into something deserving of a marketing campaign. If the laws are not explained carefully, the state could appear to be condoning and even encouraging child abandonment.

Adoption advocates are concerned these anonymous babies will never be able to retrieve their medical histories. And child welfare experts, even those who support the laws, are worried that society will be satisfied with this simple, cheap solution to a social issue much more complicated and expensive to address.

“This is a small piece of a larger problem,” says Nina Williams-Mbengue, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “There are a huge number of children abandoned every year that we don’t hear about.”

We don’t hear about the infants (about 31,000 of them in 1998, the last year for which data are available) left in the hospitals where they were born, most to mothers who are drug addicts. We don’t focus on the unconscionably high number of children abused or neglected by parents or caregivers – 903,000 in 2001, according to government figures. About 1,300 of these children died.

Instead, we’ll hear about the warehouse baby in Philadelphia or the child born to a girl attending her senior prom in New Jersey, and it seems that an epidemic is before us when the opposite is likely true. National statistics are sketchy, but probably no more than about 100 infants are abandoned each year, and there’s no evidence that the number is growing.

Worse, we know precious little about what causes a mother to discard a newborn like so much trash. “Anecdotal evidence indicates that most of the women are very young; their race and income vary,” writes Williams-Mbengue.

But if mothers likely to abandon are also likely to commit infanticide, those notions may not hold. Marcia Herman-Giddens, the lead author of a study published in March in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined 34 infant homicides in North Carolina and found that the mothers weren’t all frightened, unwed teens. In fact, 20 percent were married, and 35 percent already had other children.

Herman-Giddens’ research also showed that the sentences handed down to these mothers were wildly inconsistent. Some were charged with first-degree murder, some let off scot-free. All in the same state, remember.

So the oft-stated goal of safe-haven laws – to convince a mother she won’t be prosecuted – may be based on flimsy assumptions. There’s no uniformity in punishment. And there’s a very good chance that prosecution is the last thing on the minds of these traumatized women, many of whom are in intense denial about their pregnancy.

New Jersey spent half a million dollars to promote its safe-haven law, saving 10 newborns since 2000. Every life saved is important, certainly, but wouldn’t the money be better spent promoting birth control, family planning, and other measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place?

Fortunately, the 7 1/2-pound baby boy found last Sunday in Philadelphia survived and is now in temporary foster care. Investigators are looking for his father while the city Department of Human Services is helping his 24-year-old mother, who is home caring for her other children.

This family’s crisis won’t be addressed by a simple law, no matter how well-intentioned and meaningful. We must offer more than safe havens for our children; we must help create a world in which mothers and fathers never set their babies adrift.

Jane R. Eisner is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.