A Chinese Baby found in
A Tap Line
Police trace mother of Chinese sewage pipe baby
The mother of the Chinese newborn baby trapped in a sewer pipe in a stunning ordeal caught on video had raised the initial alarm and was present for the entire two-hour rescue but did not admit giving birth until confronted by police.
The state-run, Hangzhou-based newspaper Dushikuaibao said police became suspicious when they found baby toys and blood-stained toilet paper in the 22-year-old woman’s rented room, in the building where Saturday’s rescue occurred in eastern China.
The woman, whose name was not revealed, confessed to police when they asked her to undergo a medical check-up.
The woman told police she could not afford an abortion and
secretly delivered the child on Saturday afternoon in the toilet. She said she tried to catch the baby but he slipped into the pipe and that she alerted her landlord of the trapped baby after she could not pull the child out.
Video of the rescue of Baby No. 59 - so named because of his incubator number in the hospital - was shown on Chinese news programmes and websites starting on Monday and picked up worldwide, prompting both horror and an outpouring of charity on behalf of the newborn. The mother’s reported confession raises questions about whether she intended to abandon the baby, while suggesting that she was desperate and did not know what to do.
Zhezhong News said the woman is a high school graduate who works at a restaurant in the Zhejiang province city of Jinhua. She said she became pregnant after a one-night stand with a man who later denied any responsibility. The woman did not reveal the pregnancy to her parents. She also said she wanted to raise the child but had no idea how to do it, according to local reports.
Firefighters were called to the residential building in the Pujiang area of Jinhua to rescue the baby, which was trapped in the L-joint of a sewage pipe just below a squat toilet in one of the building’s public toilets.
Firefighters in China rescued the newborn after his cries were heard coming from a public bathroom in a residential building.
Unable to pull the baby out, rescuers were forced to carefully saw away a section of the pipe before carrying it to a nearby hospital in the city of Jinhua.
Doctors delicately pried apart the pipe from the fourth-floor toilet to make sure not to harm the baby, believed to be only days old.
He was found still with the placenta attached and was finally extracted after nearly an hour.
Images broadcast on Chinese television showed white-gloved hospital staff using a pair of pliers and a saw to painstakingly open the L-shaped section of pipe.
Baby 59 – named after the incubator in which he was placed – weighs just 5lbs. Last night, he was reported to be recovering well in a hospital in Zhejiang province. His heart rate was low and he had a fracture to his skull, according to Zhejiang Online, the area’s official news agency.
But the boy has stunned medics by surviving his ordeal. Nurse Zhang Songhe said: “When the baby arrived here, he was in critical condition. But now everything has been stabilised.”
The much-publicised rescue prompted an outpouring from strangers who came to the hospital with nappies, baby clothes, powdered milk – and offers to adopt him.
Police say they are still not sure how the baby ended up in the sewer, which was above a “squat” toilet commonly found in the Far East.
They initially treated the case as attempted murder, but later said they had found the baby’s mother and were investigating what had happened.
According to reports, the 22-year-old appeared to have given birth unexpectedly when she went to the lavatory on
Saturday and may, it is claimed, have been unaware what had happened. But the landlord of the building said it was unlikely the birth took place in the toilet because there was no evidence of blood and she was not aware of her tenants being pregnant.
In China reports of babies, usually girls, being abandoned are common and fuel public anger against a strict one-child policy that imposes huge fines on parents who violate the rules.
