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Notes -
While many of these safe haven laws technically are gender neutral in wording, in many states unwed genetic mothers by default get custody. The unwed father has no such automatic right. He has to establish paternity and petition in court before being able to have rights over any child born out of wedlock. Mind, too, that women control information about and access to the kid and therefore can very easily block such a process.
As an example, Arizona's law states that "If a child is born out of wedlock, the mother is the legal custodian of the child for the purposes of this section until paternity is established and custody or access is determined by a court."
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506194043/https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
This situation allows the mother to abandon the child or alienate him from it early on. On the other hand, if the father wants to avail himself of these safe haven laws which are technically open to him, he'll have to take the child out of the mother's custody - unlawfully - and in doing so he can be charged with custodial interference or kidnapping.
That previous Arizona law I cited also states that custodial interference is committed when someone "Takes, entices or keeps from lawful custody any child, or any person who is incompetent, and who is entrusted by authority of law to the custody of another person or institution." Anyone in violation of that opens themselves up to felony charges.
So while Arizona's safe haven law is on its face gender neutral, subject to the previous Arizona law I cited in my first comment, unwed fathers in Arizona who take the child out of the mother's custody to put it in a safe haven can still be prosecuted for custodial interference, whereas unwed mothers early on can unilaterally put their children in safe havens without anyone's consent and escape any prosecution because they are the default custodian until the father pursues access and custody.
Additionally, here's an adoption lawyer in a forum for legal advice answering a question about whether a father can give up a child to a safe haven without the mother's consent:
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-man-access-safe-haven-laws-without-the-moms--3458852.html
"Do you want to be arrested? Because if you do, that is a sure fired way. When a woman gives birth and the parents are unmarried, the woman has presumed custody. If you did this you would be facing criminal charges as an unmarried father has no rights unless he pursues then in court."
And this article provides a generalised rundown of the situation:
"Though written in gender-neutral terms, many American states now effectively permit the abandonment of newborns to be undertaken solely by genetic mothers. These acts usually foreclose, without notice or a chance to be heard, any legal parenthood for genetic fathers who are fit and willing to parent and who may even have attained federal constitutional childrearing interests, as through, for example, marital presumptions. Genetic mothers can walk away from parental responsibilities early on in a child's life, whereas comparable desertions are usually forbidden for genetic fathers in cases where the genetic mothers maintain custody, as well as for genetic mothers once their children are a little older."
"While a genetic mother having child custody may employ Safe Haven laws to escape parental responsibilities, genetic fathers without custody typically may not walk away in the same fashion. They cannot escape child support obligations, even if they never attained childrearing rights. They cannot desert their genetic offspring, even if they were fooled into conception and were forgotten (or avoided) during the pregnancy and at the birth."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/80506024.pdf
In other words, men are not able to access safe haven laws the same way women can in practice.
Again you're going up against biological reality. The one person that is definitively the parent is the one who gave birth. Given that means fathers usually have to be registered particularly in the non married situation most common and that safe haven laws are the politicians response to heat when sympathetic often post partum mothers got prosecuted for abandoning new born babies mostly soon after birth then again there is no reason mothers and fathers should be treated the same.
The issues with safe haven laws stem from the biological reality that the first parent acknowledged is going to be the mother. It isn't symmetric.
Point is, people can't pretend (as they often do in these discussions) that the system allows men and women to abandon children equally when in actual practice this is not the case. In practice, the ability to walk away is by and large reserved for the biological mother.
It's mostly accessible to mothers sure, but not necessarily because of safe haven laws themselves. And fathers in certain circumstances can access them, but it will be rarer. A father where the mother died in childbirth and so on.
Okay, so it seems we're basically in agreement about the fact that the set of interlocking laws we have in place enable women to unilaterally abandon children and prevent men from doing so without the consent of the mother, except for edge cases where the mother is somehow completely out of the picture (if she's dead etc). Outside of these situations the father is unable to legitimately abandon parental responsibility without her consent.
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