Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News-2013-05-29

A baby boy was heroically rescued alive by firefighters on Saturday at a residential building in the Pujiang area of the eastern Zhejiang province city of Jinhua in China.

This after a 22-year-old woman raised the initial alarm about a newborn trapped in the L-joint of a sewage pipe just below a squat toilet in one of the building's public restrooms.

The baby, who weighed 2.8kg with the placenta still attached had a low heart rate and some minor abrasions on his head and limbs, but was mostly unhurt is safe and in a stable condition in hospital.

The rescue prompted an outpouring from strangers who came to the hospital with diapers, baby clothes, powdered milk and offers to adopt him.

The woman whose name was not revealed in state media reports kept quiet about being his mother even as she watched the sensational two-hour rescue unfold. The state-run Zhejiang News website said she confessed to police a couple of days later when they asked her to undergo a medical checkup after searching her rented room and finding toys and blood-stained toilet paper.

Video of the rescue of Baby No 59, so named because of his incubator number in the hospital was shown on Chinese news programmes and websites starting late on Monday and picked up worldwide, prompting both horror and an outpouring of charity on behalf of the newborn.

The single woman, a tenant in the building, told police she could not afford an abortion and secretly delivered the child on Saturday afternoon in the toilet. She said the newborn slipped into the sewer line and that she alerted her landlord of the trapped baby after she could not pull the child out.

Police initially said they were treating the case as attempted homicide, but it was not immediately clear whether the mother would face any criminal charges. Its reported the mother was present throughout the entire rescue and expressed her concern for the child, a thought that didn't initially rouse suspicion of the police.

The landlord of the building told Zhejiang News earlier in the week that there were no signs that the birth took place in the restroom and she had not been aware of any recent pregnancies among her tenants.

In China, unwanted pregnancies have been on the rise because of a lack of sex education and an increasingly lax attitude toward sex. Young men and women often are engaged in unprotected sex, and abortions have become increasingly common with abortion services widely available.