Donations and adoption offers have been pouring in for the Chinese newborn who was rescued from a sewer pipe on Saturday.
“Baby 59,” known only by his hospital incubator number, was released from Zhejiang's Pujiang People's Hospital on Thursday after recovering from having been trapped in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom, according to the AP. Some of the very responders who spent two hours freeing the baby who got stuck in a pipe after his mother gave birth to him on her own, according to officials, have been offering up goods to help the newborn.
According to police, one of the firefighters sent clothes, formula, powder and diapers and other rescuers have sent milk bottles and additional formula, CNN reported.
The 22-year-old unnamed mother told police that she became pregnant after a brief affair and couldn’t afford an abortion. She secretly delivered the child on Saturday in a rental building’s restroom and said that that the infant accidentally slipped down the pipe and became stuck, the AP reported.
The woman notified officials after cleaning up the scene and revealed that she was the mother two days later after police confronted her, according to the AP.
The mother was not charged, and the boy’s maternal grandparents took him home from the hospital.
A number of supporters have come forward with offers to adopt Baby 59, who had a low heart rate and suffered some minor abrasions. But Chinese law would preclude such adoptions since the mother is still in the picture, according to the Guardian, and her care will likely not be supervised.
"If the children have parents, the government prefer to ask their parents to take the responsibility,” Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the independent 21st Century Education Research Institute, told the Guardian. “The local government does not have enough funding to establish a social security system to help those children, when their parents are not doing a good job."
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