Cleaning staff found a baby with its umbilical cord still attached in the women’s toilet of a rest area off the Kyushu Expressway on Tuesday.
Police said a member of the cleaning staff found the baby in a bag left on the bench for changing diapers just after 3 p.m. Tuesday. The infant was wrapped in gray clothes and wrapped in towels. There was no letter or identification left at the scene. The baby was taken to hospital and is in a stable condition, police said.
© News reports
26 Comments
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williamsmith
He/She needs a new family.
ronaldk
Thank God he/she is okay!
neverknow2
Probably a burden to the busy mother. No ime for children after meeting all the rich old men for lunches and dinners.
timorborder
Great that the baby was found alive.
funkyfresh
How can you get away with this?, She is registered with a baby, and eventually it'll catch up with her.
Wottock_Hunt
Funky - I think you might be forgetting we're relying on the ingenuity and guile of our Law Enforcement professionals there.
In a way, I suppose it's better the child was abandoned this young, wrapped up warm and taken into care. It does, in the long run, reduce the chances of her being beaten to death for crying in a couple of years. Fingers crossed a new, loving family can be found post haste.
seesaw
yea. it would be better that the baby grows up with a kinder mother than the one who delivered him/her.
telecasterplayer
That isn't too far from the "baby hatch" is it? Kumamoto city is pretty close to Fukuoka. It's a shame the mother and whoever couldn't think that far ahead to head a few miles south.
tmarie
What happens to the babyhatch kids anyway?
nath
What happens to all these abandoned kids? Adoption just isn't popular in Japan. Orphans and abandoned kids don't live in care homes with proxy parents, they live in orphanages. Most of them do very badly in school and end up in gaol; one good reason why effective sex education is essential and why the pill should be more readily available.
tkyosam
Happy to hear the little guy/gal is ok.
hakujinsensei
mom will never be caught. with no insurance coverage for prenatal care or birth she probably never visited a hospital. instead of encouraging the govt. to pay more for birth control and abortions, the govt should INCLUDE PRENATAL CARE AND BIRTH COSTS in insurance. birth control is readily available and free comdoms can be procured at many locations in metro areas. encouraging adoptions and a foster care system would be a great step in bringing japan into the modern age providing an alternative to such grizzly incidents. the 'orphanages' are full of unwanted kids. it it quite common to place kids of all ages up to high school in 'orphanages' here even when they have families. the group I volunteer with routinely provides aid to such organizations. god speed baby doe, and I hope that mom is somehow stricken by the depth of what she has done and gains the maturity she needs.
electric2004
Hakujinsensei:
Actually the financial situation for pregnant became more stringent. Now one has to pay 10 Man Yen in advance to the clinic as deposit and additionally a guarantor is needed. No joke - we are expecting our 3rd baby in April, and I noticed how the situation for pregnant mothers became more difficult.
ronaldk
Aso is out of touch. He thinks just like Bush that a snicker and a grin will solve everything. Should be in the trenches talking to single mothers and young families about what he can do to make it easier to have children to avoid this type of thing.
Midnightpromise
roinaldk, or perhaps this mother-not-to-be should have embraced Obamas simple approach and aborted the unwanted little bugger instead?
samsarks
more n more jp women are turning away from motherhood.some killing their kids,others want no kids at all.what sustained jp in the past years.?is it the pressures of society or the financial difficulties.thanks the kid is safe
nath
I bet the foreign ministry will deny this baby statehood, and never give it a passport. How will the baby prove that it is Japanese?
Dennis Bauer
The most important thing is that the baby is alive and not killed by an uncaring mother
Molenir
Even if the kid turns out bad, at the very least, this way it has a chance at life. Better then nothing, though a warm and loving family would have been ideal.
nath
Midnightpromise, don't you think it's far more ethical to have an abortion, rather than bring an unwanted child into the world, to grow up unloved and undereducated, condemned to a life of drudgery at best and criminality and drug dependency at worst?
Apsara
telecasterplayer, Kumamoto is more than a few miles from Fukuoka, it's around 120km. Somebody who abandons their baby in a toilet is hardly going to bother travelling that far.
Eizenhauer
When my wife was about to deliver our first baby there was a minimum of 350.000 - 550.000 yen payment to be paid to the chosen hospital. They will not accept credit cards, only direct wire money transfer or cash. And they wonder why are people here so reluctant about having babies!! Yes, government will pay back up to 300.000 yen but only if baby is minimum 3 months old and has no health complications of any kind. Good luck folks but i'm not planning to ever have another child while we live in Japan. Whole world offers free hospital care for mothers who want to deliver their babies. This young mother was possibly in a desperate situation with no cash needed for hospital delivery so she had to do it "on her own"...
nath
Who said abandoned? Maybe just misplaced.
Disillusioned
This is great news! The baby is alive! Remember all the recent deaths of unwanted children? At least this kid will have a chance at growing up and not be locked outside at 3am for crying and then having its mother bounce its head up down on the cement. I'm actually glad she dumped the baby.
hakujinsensei
electric2004: I had a bouncing baby girl just over a year ago. that was the second birth for us here in japan. the first time was not quite so demanding as we went to a national hospital and they were kind to us. but like you said, this time they wanted big bucks, about a thousand u.s. up front. and we coughed up monthly so that the total for everything was about 5000 bucks. we got 3000 bucks cash back from the feds for a 'live birth'. but everyone should know how devastating getting pregnant in japan can be financially. I was different but I can imagine how daunting it must be to a young couple who will go from starting salaries to one salary... salarymen start at about 2000 us a month including bonus and the wages dont go up that fast... every year I hear all the noise about the gov. trying new programs to get the birth rate up... for gods sake, include birth benefits IN THE INSURANCE! it might not have stayed this situation but it would definitely make a difference.
Patricia Yarrow
Wow. This is a most enlightening discussion. I had no idea it was so bad in Japan vis a vis insurance and childbirth. Explains a lot.