Baby girl was abandoned in student toilet
Police believe the woman had hoped to hide the pregnancy but because the toilet had no water filled U-bend, and because the pipe was only 20cm wide, the baby girl had become wedged a short way down, where her cries alerted other students who then raised the alarm.
Firemen rushed to the student dormitory in Linyi in eastern China’s Shandong Province.
They said they knew they were in a race against time to free her before she would die.
Fire Brigade spokesman Tao Fang said: “It was impossible to get the baby out from above. She had fallen into the toilet and gone down the pipes where she had got stuck between the third and fourth floors. We used an angle grinder to break open the pipeline on the third floor and we could then push the child up to colleagues on the fourth floor where she was handed to medics who were waiting to take her to hospital.”
Police meanwhile managed to trace the child’s mother —a student living in the building, who was also hospitalised. Police say they are waiting to question her before deciding what she might be charged with.
The shocking story caused heated debate on Chinese social media sites with many lamenting lack of values among the country’s youth and shock at the way she had simply abandoned the baby in the toilet.
One user on China’s popular social media site Weibo, WangLo34, said: “I find the image of a young woman giving birth in the toilet, cleaning herself up and then going back to her room to carry on studying a particularly worrying one and a sign of the sort of throwaway society that we live in now days.”
