Video broadcast repeatedly on Chinese state television in recent days showed the intense rescue of a newborn who spent his first few hours on Earth trapped in a sewer pipe directly beneath the toilet where his mother had unexpectedly given birth.
The images, which circulated widely on Chinese social networks, showed that rescuers in Jinhua, who could see a tiny foot beneath the toilet when they arrived on Saturday, sawed off the section of pipe the baby was trapped in and brought it to a nearby hospital, where they worked with doctors to cut him loose.
Three days after the baby was extracted from the pipe, a search for the infant’s parents ended as a woman who was on the scene during the entire rescue admitted to the police that she was the boy’s mother, the state-run Zhejiang News reported.
A police officer told Britain’s Sky News on Tuesday that the boy was healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. The unnamed police source also told the broadcaster that the mother, who had hidden her pregnancy, was the first to call for help, alerting her landlord to “weird noises†from the toilet. The landlord then spotted the child and called the authorities.
Before the mother came forward, CNN reported, the police in Jinhua had posted a message on the Chinese social network Sina Weibo reading: “Mom, come back! The baby is resilient and alive. Please show up, Mom. This is your own baby and he should return to your warm embrace soon.â€
Comments directed and the infant’s mother and father by other Weibo users were less kind, Reuters reports. “The parents who did this have hearts even filthier than that sewage pipe,†one user wrote.
Robert Mackey also remixes the news on Twitter @robertmackey.
