Baby girls tossed away in rubbish

Three baby girls have been found abandoned in Shanghai – two of them dead and the other still alive inside a plastic bag stuffed in a rubbish bin, newspapers reported.

Authorities suspect they were born to migrant women who, like most Chinese, are subject to heavy fines for having more than one child and often adhere to a traditional preference for male children.

The finds come amid reports of rising sexual activity among Shanghai minors who often lack basic knowledge about birth control.

While Chinese society has grown more tolerant of premarital sex, having children outside marriage remains heavily stigmatised – as well as a violation of family planning rules.

Newspapers said a passer-by found the live girl this week inside a plastic bag in a bin and she was now in a stable condition at a city hospital. The girl would be sent to an orphanage and put up for adoption unless her parents identified her, the Youth Daily said.

Another newborn baby was found by a street cleaner inside a plastic shopping bag and left in a ditch. Reports said she appeared to have strangled on her umbilical cord. The third baby was found inside a can in the city’s Luwan district.

The abandonments left residents shocked, the reports said.

“Her parents must be extremely cruel, because the baby was thrown away with lots of daily wastes,” said Tang Xiaojian, a neighbourhood committee member in Luwan.

“They treated her like a dead cat,” Tang said.

City welfare departments insisted such cases happen infrequently.

“It’s extremely rare for such things to happen in a city like Shanghai,” said a secretary with the city government’s Civil Affairs Department.

Chinese families have traditionally favoured male heirs who can carry on the family line and look after their parents in old age. According to custom, women in China become part of their husbands’ families after marriage.

The traditions have stuck despite laws against them and Communist Party ideology promoting gender equality. Many families also use ultrasound to learn a foetus’s gender and abort females.

According to government figures, China now shows a ratio of 116 boys to every 100 girls, with the trend far more pronounced in some areas.