Baby Flushed Down Toilet At University, Firefighters Respond [PHOTOS]

A newborn baby flushed down the toilet has been rescued by firefighters.

According to the Metro UK news site, the mother, a student at eastern China’s Linyi University in the Shandong province, gave birth to the child while standing over a toilet and then promptly flushed the little girl, who entered and was lodged into a 20-centimeter wide pipe that led away from the restroom.

A group of Linyi students heard the child crying and were able to direct firefighters to the proper location, where rescue operations began immediately.

The rescuers used an angle grinder to cut in to the pipe and push the child to the above floor where she was consoled and taken to the hospital for a checkup.

The child will survive, but it’s unclear what will become of the mother. Authorities have located her and are weighing the possibility of pressing charges, but no action has been taken at this time.

Hopefully for the child, common sense will prevail, and authorities will find her a new home.

Users on the Chinese social media site Weibo were troubled by the incident.

“I find the image of a young woman giving birth in the loo, cleaning herself up and then going back to her room to carry on studying a particularly worrying one and a sign of the sort of throwaway society that we live in now days,” said one commenter.

Child abandonment is not such a rare thing in China. While the country has “relaxed” its one-child policy, that’s only if you’re an only child, and it’s unclear what the mother’s specific situation was that might have convinced her this was the only way of dealing with the issue.

As it turns out, her baby isn’t the only one flushed down the toilet this year. In May, a similar case occurred, according to the IBTimes website.

That child survived as well.

IBTimes notes that there are around 712,000 orphans within the country, but that’s taking numbers from 2010. By now, it’s likely much higher.

What do you think, readers?

Should the woman whose baby was flushed down the toilet be punished, or is this one of those situations where you’ve got to consider the circumstances? Share your thoughts in our comments section below.