Baby 59 is the name of the newborn found in a sewer pipe in Pujiang county, China. 59 is the number of the incubator where he was held in stable condition. He was found on May 25, the day of his birth, in a sewer pipe where his mother, a 22-year old Chinese woman from Zhejiang, delivered him. She hid the existence of the pregnancy and of the baby. She had hunched over a squat toilet and gave birth to the baby. The newborn got stuck into a channel 4 inch wide.
According to Times.com the new mother even used a mop to try to dislodge the baby who got stuck and this is what saved his life in the end. The woman panicked and she then called for help, saying that something was wrong with the toilet.
Baby 59 weighed 6,2 lb. (that’s 2.8 kg, a good weight for a full term baby) and because he was wedged in that sewer pipe, the workers had to cut off the whole section of the pipe and then rushed it to the hospital where the newborn was released and treated. He had some bruises and a scraped knee but otherwise, he was healthy given the conditions.
The news of a baby being dumped in a sewer pipe spiked anger among the Chinese online communities. Users used social networks to judge the woman who was capable of such a horrible act and in many messages posted on Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) was tried and found guilty. It seems that the father of the baby refused to acknowledge the woman’s pregnancy and made her to try to dispose of the baby in such a dreadful way.
Baby 59 was released from the hospital today and was returned to his mother after the Chinese authorities concluded that the baby was trapped in the sewer pipe because of an accident. It seems that she was too frightened to come clean and admit that she had given birth to the baby trapped in the sewer but after the event she had a gradually change of heart and confessed.
The mother took the baby along with a man who is believed to be the father who initially refused to acknowledge the pregnancy.
If the baby is indeed his – he took a paternity test – the child will be well provided for by the man, said an official at the Pujiang county propaganda office.
This case shows the lack of proper sex and pregnancy education in public schools. After the Communist Chinese Government issued the „One child per family” policy, many pregnant woman aborted their babies if the fetuses proved to be girls. In China the gender imbalance between boys and girls reached 117 to 100 in 2012, according to state newswire Xinhua.
image credit: AP / foxnews
