What she felt toward Pettway continued to be, in her own reported words, complicated by genuine feeling. She had lived with Pettway as her mother for twenty-three years. Whatever Pettway had done — and the crime was serious, the harm undeniable — the emotional attachment formed over a childhood does not evaporate on the receipt of DNA results. Carlina said she still loved Pettway. She said, according to some accounts, that she intended to support Pettway through the legal proceedings. These were her statements to make, and the prompt for this article is right to note that they should not be condemned.
She kept the nickname Netty. She legally took the name Carlina White. She held both as parts of a self that had been formed in unusual circumstances and that she was now defining on her own terms.
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## Hospital Security After Carlina White
The abduction of Carlina White from Harlem Hospital in 1987 was part of a wave of infant abductions from American hospitals that began in the 1980s and drew increasing attention as the pattern became clear.
Between 1983 and 2014, according to NCMEC data, more than 130 infants were abducted from U.S. hospitals. The majority of abductors were women; the abductions typically occurred from maternity and newborn units; and the abductors often posed as medical staff or volunteers. The pattern was specific enough that NCMEC developed guidelines for hospitals and worked with hospital accreditation organizations to establish security standards for infant care units.
Among the changes that became standard across American hospitals in the years after cases like Carlina’s: