Beijing: A Chinese baby, who was rescued from a sewer pipe, was released from a hospital to his maternal grandparents late Wednesday.
In another development, the newborn’s mother will probably evade any criminal charge because authorities have reportedly concluded that he fell into the toilet after his birth accidentally.
The baby’s 22-year-old mother remains under medical care, the state-run Jinhua Evening News reported, in an account confirmed on Thursday by a local police official who declined to give his name.
The baby's stunning, two-hour rescue from a pipe underneath a squat toilet in Zhejiang province's Pujiang county captivated the world, prompting both horror and an outpouring of charity on his behalf.
The mother initially raised the alarm about the baby when he got stuck on Saturday in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom of a residential building, but she had cleaned the room of signs of a fresh birth and did not immediately come forward as the mother, officials have been quoted as saying.
She admitted she was the mother two days later when confronted by police who found baby toys and blood-stained tissues in her apartment, the reports said.
Police later concluded that the incident was an accident and that the woman did not initially come forward because she was frightened, but that she later started telling the truth, the Jinhua Evening News and a Pujiang county propaganda official said.
The police initially treated the case as a possible attempted homicide, but now are unlikely to file criminal charges, the newspaper and the official said.
A man tracked down by police who is believed to be the baby's father has requested a paternity test and — if the baby is his — is willing to help support the child, said the Pujiang official, who declined to give his name, as is customary among Chinese officials.
The case has raised discussion over China's lack of proper education about sex, birthing and contraception in many schools. Unwanted pregnancies have been on the rise because of an increasingly lax attitude toward premarital sex. The woman told police she got pregnant after a brief affair with the man, hid her pregnancy from family and neighbours, and secretly delivered the child on Saturday in a rental building's restroom. She said the infant accidentally slipped into the squat toilet and — after cleaning up the scene — raised the alarm.
Firefighters, who arrived at the rental building, found the infant trapped in an L-shaped section of sewage pipe just below the squat toilet in one of the building's shared restrooms.
In video footage, officials were shown removing the pipe from a ceiling that apparently was just below the restroom and then, at the hospital, using pliers and saws to gently pull apart the pipe, which was about 10 centimetres (3 inches) in diameter.
The baby, who weighed 2.8 kilograms (6 pounds, 3 ounces), had a low heart rate and some minor abrasions on his head and limbs, but was mostly uninjured, according to local reports. The placenta was still attached
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