Hospital Gives Babies a Safe Start With Free Seats for the Trip Home

As seven newborn babies slept, gurgled and squirmed, their mothers and fathers waited to receive New Year’s Eve gifts that would enable them to drive the infants home safely--and legally.

The seven families are the first of 375 low-income families to get free infant car seats at an East Los Angeles hospital as part of a nationwide “Operation Baby Buckle” program.

Many of the parents, all of whom receive MediCal benefits, said that without the free seats--handed out Thursday at White Memorial Medical Center--they could not afford to comply with the state law requiring special safety restraints for children aged 4 or younger and weighing less than 40 pounds.

Starting today, it will be easier for police to issue $100 tickets for violations.

Under a new state law, officers can stop and cite drivers merely because they are suspected of not having children safely secured. Until now, such tickets--like those for failure to use seat belts--could be issued only when a car was stopped for other violations.

White Memorial will hand out the seats to the qualifying families of newborns throughout January.

“So now, for approximately one month, we can be assured that every newborn leaving this hospital will have the security and protection it needs,” said Charles Ricks, president of the hospital, which delivers enough babies a year to fill about 100 school buses.

Lila Zamacona of El Monte, who just delivered her fourth child, a son, said news of the free seat was a perfect way to kick off the new year. “I go, ‘Oh God, great, I need this,”’ the 23-year-old mother said.

The national Operation Baby Buckle program--which is expected to distribute 10,000 of the infant seats--is a partnership between various hospitals and Georgia-based Primerica Financial Services Corp.

The company’s chairman and CEO, Pete Dawkins--a famed Army halfback of the late 1950s and a retired brigadier general--said White Memorial was picked to participate in the program because it is one of the top 50 hospitals in the nation in childbirths.

Of 300 children killed in car crashes over the last five years in California, a vast majority might have survived if their parents had used such seats, according to SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A. of Inglewood.