Baby 59: mother insists child accidentally slipped into toilet

Firefighters and doctors rescue the abandoned newborn by cutting away a sewage pipe piece by piece
The mother of a Chinese baby that survived after becoming trapped in a sewage pipe has claimed she kept her pregnancy secret after the father refused to stand by her but insisted that the child had accidentally slipped into the lavatory.
The 22-year-old woman, who is from Zhejiang province in east China but has not been named, told police she only realised she was carrying a baby three months into her pregnancy and had not told her parents.
She attempted to conceal her pregnancy by using loose-fitting clothes and confronted the baby's father but he rejected her appeals for help, the state-run Zhejiang News website reported.
With insufficient money for an abortion, the mother said she had been forced to secretly deliver the baby last Saturday inside a lavatory at her home in the city of Jinhua.
The baby had accidentally slipped down the lavatory, she reportedly claimed. Police are not convinced by that version of events.
It is not clear what charges, if any, the woman will face and on Wednesday one police official warned that the public outcry over had left her emotional tatters.
"It will not help anyone if the mother becomes so depressed that she ends up committing suicide," warned a local Public Security Bureau official who gave his name as Mr Fang.
Police are still looking for the father, who is reported to have refused to acknowledge paternity of the child.
His comments came as the fireman who led the rescue said he had feared the trapped infant would die after his feet turned purple.
Speaking to the foreign media for the first time, 31-year-old Zheng Yuzheng, a Public Security Bureau firefighter, told The Daily Telegraph he had been alerted to the unusual occurrence by an emergency call to his station at 4.39pm on Saturday.
"On the way to the building we imagined it might be a three or four-year-old toddler who had fallen into the toilet by accident. But when we arrived on the scene I couldn't believe my eyes. I just couldn't believe how a human being could have become stuck in such a thin pipe," he said.
Mr Zheng said that on reaching a fourth floor toilet he had "heard noises coming from inside [a pipe]... [that] sounded like a baby crying."
His team eventually managed to remove a portion of piping from the third floor with the two-day-old baby still cocooned inside.
But there were no celebrations.
"When we took out the pipe the ambulance workers and doctors were already waiting there and I showed them the pipe and asked whether the boy might be able to survive," he said. "The doctor said: 'Probably not.' I saw his little feet were turning purple and I thought to myself that he wouldn't make it. We almost gave up."
Paramedics rushed the 6lb boy – named Baby 59 after his the number of his incubator he was treated in - to the nearby People's Hospital and began the painstaking task of attempting to extricate his tiny body using a small handsaw bought from a nearby shop.
At 6.20pm, almost two hours after the emergency call, the baby was freed and placed in incubator 59.
"I felt huge relief and really happy. We had saved this newborn baby's life," said Mr Zheng. "[But] this is our job - this is our responsibility as firefighters.
"I didn't think too much at the time about how the baby ended up in there.
"But he is a really strong-willed baby and he was making noises as if he wanted us to know he was there and that he wanted to survive."
Newborn baby rescued alive from sewage pipe
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