Mother of baby flushed into toilet pipe claims it was an accident

Chinese police say the mother of the baby flushed down the toilet will not be persecuted as she claims it was an accident. According to reports from daily mail:

A newborn baby boy plucked alive from a sewer pipe was flushed down a toilet 'by accident', police have said today.They have also confirmed the young mother, who is reportedly also recovering in hospital after experiencing 'birth complications', will not face prosecution.

The 22-year-old woman is believed to have raised the initial alarm but only confessed to police after they searched her rented room and found toys and blood-stained toilet paper, the Chinese state news agency reported.

A newborn baby boy plucked alive from a sewer pipe was flushed down a toilet 'by accident', police have said today. They have also confirmed the young mother, who is reportedly also recovering in hospital after experiencing 'birth complications', will not face prosecution.

The 22-year-old woman is believed to have raised the initial alarm but only confessed to police after they searched her rented room and found toys and blood-stained toilet paper, the Chinese state news agency reported.  The single woman, a tenant in the building, told police she could not afford an abortion and secretly delivered the child Saturday afternoon in the toilet.

She said the newborn slipped into the sewer line and that she alerted her landlord of the trapped baby after she could not pull the child out, Zhejiang News said. The landlord of the building said there were no signs that the birth took place in the restroom and she had not been aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants.

But the mother told police she cleaned up the toilet after the delivery and that she had managed to hide her pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and tightly wrapping her abdomen.Hundreds of thousands of Chinese people took to Weibo – their version of Twitter –  to vent their fury at the mother, believed to be an unmarried 22-year-old.

News of the rescue also prompted an outpouring of help from locals who came to the hospital armed with nappies, baby clothes, powdered milk and even offers to adopt the child. Nurse Zhang Songhe told the Daily Mail that the mother of the baby was with him in hospital. ‘I don’t know the reason she abandoned the baby. ‘We’re going to take care of the baby. We are not sure when the baby can be discharged. ’She added: 'When the baby arrived here, he was in critical condition. 'We suspect he has a fracture in the top right section of his skull. But now everything has been stabilized.'

Follow Residents living in a residential building in Jinhua in the wealthy coastal province of Zhejiang reported the sound of a baby crying in the public restroom on Saturday. The landlord of the building in Pujiang county told Zhejiang News that it was unlikely the birth took place in the restroom because there was no evidence of blood and she was not aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants. The baby was stuck in an L-shaped portion of the sewage pipe with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (3 inches).

The video shows rescuers sawing off a section of the pipe along a ceiling that apparently was just below the restroom. His eyes, face and body were covered in the filth of the pipe. There are frequent reports in Chinese media of babies being abandoned often shortly after birth, a problem attributed variously to young mothers unaware they were pregnant, the birth of an unwanted girl in a society which puts greater value on boys or China’s strict family planning rules. The case has been widely discussed on China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo due to the graphic nature of the footage, with calls for the parents to be severely punished.