A newborn baby girl is recovering in hospital after being found dumped inside a toilet in western Beijing.
Residents discovered the baby – one of an estimated 10,000 children abandoned each year in China – trapped in a pipe under a lavatory after hearing her crying.
“The baby’s head was pointing downwards and her whole body had already fallen into the drain. We could only see the baby’s feet from the side,” Qian Feng, the police officer who rescued the baby, told the Beijing Times.
After Qian successfully tugged the baby’s body from the pipe, locals wrapped her in a towel and sent her to hospital where her condition is reportedly stable. Police are investigating who left her in the public toilet.
Chinese newspapers frequently carry reports about the abandonment of newborn babies. In one of the most shocking recent cases firefighters spent two hours cutting a 5lb-baby boy from a sewage pipe in a housing estate in Zhejiang province.
The baby’s mother later said she had hidden her pregnancy after being abandoned by the father and ended up giving birth in the lavatory.
So many Chinese babies are deserted each year that some cities have set up “baby safety islands” where parents can safely leave their unwanted offspring.
However, social workers were forced to suspend one such project in Guangzhou last year after it was inundated with arrivals.
Historically, a cultural preference for baby boys has meant that most abandoned children were girls. Today, nearly all have physical disabilities such as Down’s syndrome or cerebral palsy.
Additional reporting by Luna Lin
