Although I'm not certain I suspect that there's at least one exception to that rule.....when it's deemed by hospital administration that a newborn is in danger of mistreatment/abuse/neglect/improper parenting they'd almost certainly be allowed to "take custody" of the child,temporarily,on an emergency basis until a court or government official takes the matter further.
As I said earlier,OB/Newborn Medicine is world unto itself with its own standards of practice *and* legal requirements.
Hospital staff cannot “take custody”. In fact some babies have died because a parent refused treatment. Anyone can petition a court for emergency protective orders but hospitals cannot take charge over a life. Being in a hospital doesn’t change the law. A doctor or other hospital staff cannot simply take you over your will, not outside a hospital and not in it, either. Mental health holds when you are a danger to yourself or others still requires follow up through the legal process.
Not to mention the financial issues as to why police,county, and medical staff refuse to even issue holds: Money. Once they take custody using the mental health statutes they pay the costs. They don’t either have the money or don’t want to spend it.
It’s possible but EXTREMELY rare for something like that to happen. When I did my internship with DFS there was a case I was involved in where a woman came into the ER with her baby and the doctor took immediate emergency custody of the child to keep the woman from leaving with the baby. The DFS case managers that I worked with were stunned that a doctor would do that, My immediate supervisor said flat out “It is nearly ungeard of for that to happen”. The reason for this was because the mother was upset that a hotline call had been made because the story of “She fell in the bathtub”, didn’t match with the symptoms of Shaken baby syndrome that the child presented.