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Worried that someone is out to nab your kid? Don’t be:
The truth is that no one is trying to steal your baby. It doesn’t matter what kind of ID tags your hospital employs, or how many surveillance cameras are mounted in the hallway. The incidence of nonfamily infant abductions is so impossibly low—the actual crime so rare in practice—that it hardly matters at all…
The NCMEC has systematically compiled information on every case of baby-snatching (PDF) since 1983, a 26-year stretch in which it has recorded a total of 267 incidents. Over the same period, 108 million babies were born in the United States. That is to say, the chance a stranger will steal your newborn—from your hospital room, your home nursery, or anywhere else—is about one in 400,000. That’s a very, very small number. Here’s some perspective: Your baby’s odds of getting snatched are considerably smaller—five times smaller, in fact—than her odds of being struck and killed by a lightning bolt.
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