Custom behind dumped babies’ bodies

A RURAL tradition of abandoning dead children may have played a part in the case of the 21 babies’ bodies found in a Chinese river.

Police arrested two mortuary workers from the Affiliated Hospital of Jining Medical University in Shandong province who were paid by the babies’ families to dispose of the bodies. The babies have since been cremated.

Hospital procedures normally call for families to take away the bodies of their dead infants. However, among some rural families the death of a young child is considered bad luck and the body is often abandoned or buried in an unmarked grave.