ABC first championed the preservation of families when it developed the Luis Sanjurjo Day Care Center, a state-of-the-art early childhood program inside the most infamous, dangerous and squalid shelter, a "welfare" hotel called the Martinique. There, ABC's daily "rescue missions" for children and families engaged it in the fight for daycare and housing for overwhelmed homeless families and ultimately led to the class action lawsuit, Grant v. Cuomo. By the late 1980's, when the crack epidemic had swept through poor neighborhoods, leaving in its wake unprecedented numbers of haunted and abandoned children, thousands of cocaine-exposed infants were left to languish in the lonely wards of hospitals where they were warehoused in cribs with tops on them, like cages. At this same time, the AIDS epidemic left thousands of children orphaned, and often sick themselves. Babies lived out their long days and nights in hospitals, ravaged and alone, often tethered to the sides of their cribs, eventually no longer yearning for any familiar voice, for someone to rock them. Many of them died. Burials in little shoe-box size coffins in mass graves on Hart Island became a routine fact of life.
Thus, in 1987, ABC brought two more class action lawsuits against the city and state on behalf of these "boarder babies", which successfully ended the policy and practice of storing babies in the expensive and cold wards of hospitals. This landmark litigation helped rescue boarder babies across the nation with the exception of New Jersey, where ABC subsequently brought a separate, successful class action lawsuit. And to demonstrate that medically fragile infants, entitled to - and especially in need of - stable loving caregivers could live at home with nurturing families, ABC created Variety Cody Gifford House in 1989 as a replicable model program. Its success was stunning in reuniting children with their families and finding permanent adoptive homes for some of the City's most fragile children. ABC has remodeled Variety Cody Gifford House for infants with special needs.
ABC has been at the forefront of the battle to change the public policies that affect children who have HIV infection and AIDS. Its 1995 class action lawsuit which secured maternal counseling and newborn testing and treatment has had a profound and lasting impact. Ten years ago, pediatric AIDS was pandemic in communities like East Harlem. Today, it is a rarity.
In 2002, ABC won an important victory in federal court for all homeless children who suffer from asthma and who are now guaranteed outreach, early and free periodic screening and diagnosis and corrective treatment, eliminating needless suffering and making certain that a potentially debilitating condition is diagnosed before it becomes medically more complex, costlier to treat and permanently disabling.
As an amicus curiae, ABC filed a brief in the New York State Court of Appeals advocating for equal civil marriage rights on behalf of the children of same sex unions. The legislature plans to take up this issue in the near future.
By creating replicable, cost-effective and humane model programs that influence public policy, by speaking out in public forums, by widely circulating its special reports, and by bringing class action lawsuits on behalf of children in need, ABC has achieved the following essential reforms: ensuring inclusionary education for disabled preschoolers, securing HIV counseling, testing and treatment for all children including those in foster care and diagnosis and treatment for homeless children with asthma, and eliminating the cruel and expensive practice of "boarding" babies. And in so doing, ABC has permanently altered the public debate, improving the lives of children who, otherwise, might have waited unnoticed, vulnerable and suffering, with no advocate to witness their pain and give voice to their needs.
In its pursuit to secure basic rights for children, ABC has been privileged to have the pro bono counsel of Mitchell S. Bernard, Colin Crawford, Pamela Jarvis, Thomas Moreland, David Frankel, John Kinsey, Margaret Keane, Larry Lustberg, Vivian Polak, Johathan Damon, Paul Cohen, Kathryn Catenacci, Desiree DiCorcia, Boaz Green, Angela Papalaskaris and Colin Stewart and the following leading law firms: Kramer, Levin Naftolis & Frankel; Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson; LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae; and Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Giffinger & Vecchione.
