Innocent victim of China's one child policy? Newborn baby girl discarded in bin and left to die in plastic bag... with her throat cut



An abandoned newborn baby is recovering in hospital after having her throat cut, being put in a plastic bag and thrown into a garbage bin in China's Liaoning province.

The female baby - so newborn that her placenta and umbilical cord were still attached - was discovered by a man who was searching a bin for recyclables.



Local residents called police and the tiny girl was taken to hospital, where she remains in a critical condition.

The premature baby was found in a bin, with placenta and umbilical cord still attached, in Anshan city in northeast China

A resident who witnessed the girl being taken to hospital said: 'She was still breathing and had a heartbeat. Blood from the wound stained the whole body.'

Doctors worked to close a two-inch wound across her neck, so deep that it went down to her windpipe.

Throat cut: The plight of the unnamed baby has horrified China, despite the incidence of 'guilt children' being abandoned in the nation is still high

A doctor at the hospital said that had the cut been any deeper at all 'she would have died instantly'.

The girl was found in Anshan city, in northeast China.



She is believed to be a victim of the country's notorious one child policy - and seems to confirm the long-held belief that parents upon which this restriction is imposed prefer boys.

Infanticide of 'guilt children' is still a problem in rural areas but it is rare in cities, where children are usually abandoned but not killed.



The baby's fate has horrified China. The girl, who is yet to be named, was spotted when a collectibles scavenger saw what he thought was a dead baby in a bag.

He told police that the child was purple and had not moved until he examined the bag more closely – not convinced that it was a real baby.

Doctors said that baby had been born premature and was probably between 32 and 34 weeks old, weighing just three pounds. Medics said that once the baby had recovered it would be put in a children's home.



FAMILY PLANNING ON A BIBLICAL SCALE: PREVENTING 400 MILLION BIRTHS

The painted sign reads, 'It is forbidden to discriminate against, mistreat or abandon baby girls' China's controversial 'policy of birth planning' was introduced in 1978 and officially restricts married, urban couples to having one child. The policy allows exemptions in some cases - including rural couples, couples without siblings on either side, and ethnic minorities. Residents of Hong Kong and Macau are exempt from the policy, as are foreign nationals living in China. The Chinese government claims that the policy has probably prevented more than 400 million births. Critics inside China and around the world have condemned the policy and accused the government of enforcing abortions. Despite the fact that it is illegal to kill newborn babies in the country, female infanticide and the failure to report female births is widely suspected, especially in rural areas. An international conference on human rights, held ten years before the policy was introduced, proclaimed: 'Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children.'

Despite 1this, an independent 2008 survey reported that 76 per cent of the Chinese population supported the policy.





