If this doesn't touch you, check your pulse (courtesty of the Associated Press):
All too often, the ring of Debi Faris-Cifelli's cell phone means there is another abandoned newborn at the morgue, another forsaken child for her to recover, name and bury in a shoebox-sized coffin under a white cross in the California desert.
Faris-Cifelli, who has struggled to fund her cemetery and to publicize a law that lets parents give up unwanted babies no questions asked, got a very different call last week.
She had won the California lottery. The jackpot: $27 million. It was only the third time she and her husband had played.
''Maybe it's the children saying 'Thank you' for taking care of them when nobody else would,'' Faris-Cifelli said in a telephone interview, bubbling with laughter. ''It's a gift and one for which we feel an awesome responsibility.''
The money couldn't come at a better time for Faris-Cifelli and her Garden of Angels, the tiny cemetery in the inland town of Calimesa where she has buried 25 tiny children whose mothers didn't hear -- or didn't care -- about California's underused safe haven law.
Financed by a patchwork of donations, grants, car washes and bake sales, her life's work has been to spread word that scared and confused parents should drop their newborns at firehouses and hospitals -- not in trash cans and back alleys. Parents have three days to abandon their infants without fear of prosecution under the 2001 legislation. California is one of 46 states with such a law.
Faris-Cifelli, who helped win passage of the law, lobbies in states without safe haven laws, talks to teens and police and has attended 12 trials of mothers accused of abandoning their infants. But state funding is scarce, so Faris-Cifelli, 49, does all that with just a three-person staff and $172,000 annual budget.
Now the deeply religious mother and her high school counselor husband Steve will soon receive an after-tax lump sum of nearly $9 million. Some will go to the couple's seven children, most to her crusade.
Her cemetery shows how much work remains. When someone does find a dead baby in a three-county area that stretches from Los Angeles to this inland town, the morgue knows whom to call.
Since she started burying babies in 1996, 70 of the 95 plots have been filled in the Calimesa graveyard 70 miles east of Los Angeles.
Since the law went into effect four years ago, 107 babies have been abandoned and survived statewide, while only 67 babies have been safely surrendered. Faris-Cifelli has buried fewer babies each year, but no one knows how many have died.
''This law does work, but it works when there is some kind of campaign going along with it,'' Faris-Cifelli said. ''It just hurts me that we don't talk about it until there's a baby who's lost its life.''
The state budgets about $1.5 million for advertising -- not enough to buy even one statewide TV spot, according to Andrew Roth, spokesman for the California Department of Social Services, the agency responsible for monitoring the law.
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