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And that's how a dumpster baby is made.

They were caught when Amy went to the hospital for postnatal compli-
cations. Amy ended up serving 22 months of a 30-month manslaughter
sentence and Brian served 18 months of a 24-month sentence. I remem-
ber how outraged my mom was. She told me that the law didn't think
children were worth anything. She said, "Ed, if you were to die right
now due to someone's misconduct, it wouldn't even make sense for us to
sue. We wouldn't make enough to payoff the lawyer fees."

They weren't the first to dispose of an unwanted newborn in
a dumpster. You can find reports of similar incidences as far back as the
70s. Dumpsters were first produced in 1936, and I'm sure there have
been dumpster babies almost as long, undiscovered or forgotten in his-
tory. It happens fairly regularly. Every few years a story about one will
turn up in some small corner of a buried newspaper page. But Amy and
Brian made it a trope. Something about their story engaged the nation
for one fleeting moment, long enough for "dumpster baby" to become a
part of the vernacular. I think their being young, upper-class and white
probably had something to do with it. "Dumpster baby" evokes an
image of a white suburban girl in the bathroom at prom, her expen-
sive, carefully selected dress bunched up under her arms as she squats,
expelling a bloody infant like a turd into the toilet, then wrapping it up
in paper towel swaddling cloth and leaving it in the dumpster outside.
When we think of who has a dumpster baby, we think of an immature
and self-centered, scared teenager. Someone a lot like Amy Grossberg.

Usually when they find a dumpster baby, nobody knows who
the parents are. Without parents, it's just an anonymous pile of flesh and
soft bones in a metal crib with pizza boxes and dirty napkin bedding.
With parents, it's a story. We don't actually give a shit about the baby.

I wonder what would happen.if someone threw their baby in
the wrong recycling bin. Would it ruin the whole batch of glass bottles,
corrugated cardboard, or old newspapers with bold headlines still
proudly announcing their out-of-date reports?

The idea of a bin marked "babies" makes me laugh. I'm imagining it
full-no, brimming-with babies. A teenage mother drives into the
recycling center and tosses the baby out the window into the bin. She
doesn't even get out of the car. It makes the sound of a squeaky toy when

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