One by one, Claire Louise Wertman-Parris pulled faded newspaper clippings from a brown envelope.
“Nurse finds newborn in washroom.” “Nurses discover a 7-pound girl in a plastic bag.”
Published in 1989, the articles described an abandoned infant found at the Scarborough General Hospital. As she read them two decades later, in 2012, after receiving an envelope from her adoptive mother, Wertman-Parris realized the swaddled baby with wide eyes on the page was her.
“In some ways, it felt like Pandora’s box, emotionally,” said Wertman-Parris, who goes by Luu.
Wertman-Parris was abandoned as an infant during a period when multiple babies were left behind and later entered the child welfare system, where Black children are overrepresented. Years after learning who she was, Wertman-Parris says she’s ready to tell her story, her way. She plans to travel to her ancestral home of Jamaica, where she’ll spend four months writing a memoir that explores some of the most difficult parts of her life, including her birth.
“It’s a way of healing,” said Wertman-Parris. “It’s a way of taking back my story, because the story was told without me, before I even knew anything.”
It was the headline of the day across Toronto’s biggest newspapers — the Star, the Sun, the Globe and Mail — when Wertman-Parris was discovered in a tied plastic bag in a hospital washroom by a nurse on duty, in the early hours of March 27, 1989.
Initially, Wertman-Parris was named “Nora” after the nurse who found her, and she was made a temporary ward of the Metropolitan Children’s Aid Society. Days later, the agency was granted full guardianship, and adoption proceedings began.
When babies are left behind
Babies discovered in hospitals, churches and public spaces become periodic news events in Toronto. Mothers, if found, are often charged with abandonment.
Around the time Wertman-Parris was found, multiple cases of abandoned infants in Toronto were reported, including deaths. A 2000 Toronto Star article said about five newborns were abandoned each year. In subsequent years, several abandoned babies were buried at Elgin Mills Cemetery. Data requested from Ontario’s coroner showed there were 21 abandoned-infant deaths between 2015 and 2022, with 11 of those deaths considered undetermined and one death in 2015 considered a homicide — figures that reflect only some documented cases.
Ellen Campbell, founder of Abuse Hurts, a centre for survivors of abuse, has co-ordinated many burials for abandoned infants. She has advocated for the past 13 years for safe options for mothers to surrender babies.
In the U.S., there are Safe Haven Laws that allow parents to anonymously and legally leave unharmed newborns at designated locations — hospitals, fire stations or police stations — without fear of prosecution. Canada has no such legislation, despite calls for it over the years.
Often, Canadian mothers were asked to contact police but once found, were charged. In the case of “Baby Janey,” who in 1988 was left in a field in Scarborough, police were able to locate and charge her teenage mother.
In December 2025, a baby was left in a shoebox at a church in Toronto, and the mother, once found, was charged. Under the Criminal Code, where a child under 10 is deemed to have been abandoned, regardless of where they were left, a person may face charges when the child is abandoned or exposed so that their life or health is endangered.
Campbell said mothers may relinquish their children for different reasons, including mental health challenges, immigration or legal troubles, trauma, a lack of support or resources, and other circumstances that can leave them feeling they have no choice.
“It’s not about blaming the mother, it’s about ‘why don’t we fix this?’” said Campbell. “What we want to try to do is make it possible for a woman to take a baby to a hospital and leave the baby anonymously in a way that is safe.”
Right now, without policy and protocol, babies left even at a hospital might not receive immediate care, which could endanger their lives.
Many U.S. states have boxes that lock once a baby is put inside and automatically alert emergency officials. In 2024, a Bowmanville fire station opened Ontario’s first infant surrender site with a similar idea.
But Campbell said boxes wouldn’t be needed if hospitals and other designated locations had clear protocols to accept babies anonymously.
At the time Wertman-Parris was found in 1989, only a few hours old, police did not investigate it as a criminal matter. No charges were laid.
“I had compassion and empathy for my birth mother,” Wertman-Parris said about finding out her birth story. “One of the first thoughts I had was: what happened to her for her to do something like that?”
Wertman-Parris said she has wondered about her mother’s situation — what supports existed at the time and if her mother, a Black Jamaican immigrant woman in the ‘80s, had access to them.
“Could she have talked about abortion, could she have afforded it?” said Wertman-Parris. “Was she even in a safe environment to let anyone know she was pregnant?”
Reclaiming her story
Babies found alive are typically placed in the child welfare system if they are not reunited with biological family. Abandonment is one of several ways children enter the system in Toronto, where Black children are disproportionately represented overall, with many of those children being of Jamaican heritage.
Wertman-Parris was one of those children. In May 1989, she was adopted by a multiracial family. She said she attended private school for several years in Ottawa, where her family lived for a time, and was often one of the few Black students.
Wertman-Parris said she remembers a man knocking at the door of their house and asking if it was a group home, once he saw Wertman-Parris was Black and her stepfather was white.
“I’m the darkest one, so it’s very clear I’m not part of the family,” said Wertman-Parris. She was always intensely aware she was adopted.
Wertman-Parris said she travelled to Jamaica throughout her life before she ever learned her biological parents are both Jamaican. Now she plans to spend four months in the Caribbean country. She is raising money for the trip and to support the writing of her memoir, for which she is seeking a publisher.
“It feels very ancestral to me,” said Wertman-Parris. “It’s something that I feel is a gift to myself and a rightful thing I should do to respect my writing process.”
When she visited her maternal grandmother in Jamaica, they walked together in the village where her biological mother grew up. Two older men sitting down on upturned crates on the road recognized her as kin before even knowing who she was. Wertman-Parris said she can see so many parts of who she is in her biological family, like the way she walks or her sense of humour.
“That was really special to me,” said Wertman-Parris. “That had never happened to me in my life before.”
In her memoir, she said she plans to explore how being abandoned at birth shaped her relationships and behaviour, writing about the difficult feelings that surfaced after learning her history — including fear of abandonment, hypervigilance and people-pleasing. The book will also reflect on what she learned about her biological family and how that knowledge reshaped her understanding of herself.
“What I’m hoping that people get from this (memoir) is that whatever their lives have been, wherever they come from, whatever they’re experiencing now, that they always have a card to play.”
