There are plenty of mothers who deliver their babies only to realize they can’t possibly take care of them. That’s one of the reasons we have something called “safe surrender” or “safe haven” laws.

These laws give parents who have realized they are unable to care for their newborns a safe and legal way to safely give them up soon after birth, no questions asked.

Depending on the state, you might be able to surrender a newborn at a hospital, police station, or fire station.

California’s Safe Surrender Law saved is precisely what saved the life of baby Naomi in March of 2015. It allows parents to hand their newborns over to the state anonymously within 72 hours of birth – no names, no explanations. This encourages people to do the right thing without fear of criminal charges or even just being judged.

It might seem unthinkable to some parents, but these laws prevent abuse, infanticide, and abandonment of newborns as well as miserable childhoods.

But that didn’t make it any easier for Capt. Daryll Milliot to process when he first opened the door to the Station 75 fire department in Santa Ana, California that March evening.

He didn’t know what to do with himself when the woman standing there handed him her newborn.

“I opened the door and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘I need to give you my baby,'” Milliot said.

He dutifully took the baby, who was 15 hours old at the time.

His colleagues Michael de Leon, Tyler Green, and Shawn Stacy were shocked as well, but they all did their best to comfort the infant. She was the first-ever to be surrendered to a fire station in Orange County.

“We did our best to compose ourselves, maintain professionalism and do what we needed to do,” de Leon said.

They called for a state social worker to come pick her up, but in the meantime, they were simply dazzled by the adorable newborn. They dubbed themselves her “unofficial uncles.”

Eventually, the mean realized that what happened was probably for the best and that the mother – instead of being neglectful and uncaring – was actually quite brave to make such a move.

“The first thing that comes to your mind is, ‘How can you surrender your baby?'” de Leon said. “But then when you really think about what happened, it’s really heroic and brave to do it.”

As for Naomi, there were no moments in which she was not surrounded by love after that.

Krysten and Kurt Snyder got the call that same night that there was an infant in need of an immediate home.

“[The social worker said] there was a little girl that was a Safe Surrender, and that we needed to pick her up from the hospital in a couple of hours,” Kurt Snyder said.

Krysten Snyder said the whole thing was surreal:

“It’s so crazy — one moment we say, ‘Yes, we are taking a baby,’ and the next moment you are packing the car up, making the list for Target of all the things you need to get,” Krysten said.

Naomi now has a loving family: her parents, a brother that the Snyders were in the process of adopting when they got the call about Naomi, and an extended family of 4 “unofficial uncles.”

Naomi’s story making the news “is a great opportunity for us to tell her about her mom, and what a courageous thing she did,” Krysten Snyder said.

Naomi even got a chance to visit her “uncles” a few months later.

“This is one of the few things in my 25 years of being a fireman that it’s just the greatest ending of the story,” Milliot said.

Be sure to scroll down below to see the story and footage from a visit the Snyders took back to the fire station with their family.

If you’d like to learn more about the U.S.’s Safe Haven laws, click here.

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Source: O.C. Register, NBC LA, CBS Los Angeles via YouTube