Child Welfare Birth Match: Timely Use of Child Welfare Administrative Data to Protect Newborns

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was enacted to clarify that the safety of the child is the primary concern of child welfare. A key provision of ASFA is the reunification bypass provision that permits foregoing efforts to reunify children if parents have previously been engaged in acts of maltreatment that predict future harm to children.  Ideally, Child Welfare Services (CWS) should base service decisions on the safety and risk of future harm to a child. With many risk factors to consider and different levels of vulnerability for children of differing ages, the prediction of future harm is quite inexact and no national data exist about the proportion of infants who were seriously abused or died at the hands of a parent who had previously experienced a termination of parental rights.  There is no doubt however that filicide is a significant American problem. National data show that approximately 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007 with 42.2% of those deaths being infants younger than age 1 (U. S. Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2009) and parents were the perpetrators in approximately 75% (69.9%) of all child deaths caused by abuse or neglect (US DHHS, 2009).

This presentation describes the implementation of additional procedures to increase child safety for newborns instituted in a number of jurisdictions across the United States but focusing on the ongoing work in Maryland.  These jurisdictions are endeavoring to protect newborn children who have been born to a parent who has experienced the removal of a child from their home, the prior termination of parental rights coupled with a Child Protective Services (CPS) finding, or another form of identification of the parent as a significant safety risk for the newborn. These procedures are referred to as birth match and are designed to harness the power of existing data systems to identify at risk children and offer protective and preventative services to the family, that are squarely based on current legal premises and child welfare traditions.

Using interviews with decision-makers, a comprehensive review of policies and procedures and an examination of child welfare outcomes, the formative processes, mechanics, benefits, and barriers to each of the birth match methodologies is described in detail along with initial outcomes.  In Maryland approximately 30% of cases identified by the birth match process are already known to the child welfare system due to a pre-existing case, the other 70% of cases receive some form of child protective services contact.  Currently, the state is in the process of examining the long term impact of these visits in stabilizing families – the results of which will be presented along with the overview of Birth Match. 

These methods of protecting vulnerable newborns should be seriously considered by policy makers and practitioners in every state. All three processes share common elements—the use of prior knowledge to inform current decision-making regarding newborns—but each has a unique way to capture, process, and act on this information.