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Updated: 05/29/13 at 2:25 pm EST

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JINHUA, China, May 29, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The mother of the newborn baby who was rescued by firefighters after becoming lodged in a sewage pipe leading from a public toilet in Jinhua, China, won’t be charged, according to a local police official.

According to reports, the 22-year-old single mother was in fact the person who originally raised the alarm that the baby was stuck by alerting her landlord. She was reportedly present throughout the rescue, but did not identify herself as the mother until police confronted her.

She claims that she gave birth unexpectedly while sitting on the toilet, and attempted to grab the baby before it slipped into the pipe. 

“Our investigations showed it was an accident,” a local police officer told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday.

Police also said the mother “deeply regrets what she did.” 

However, reports indicated that at the time he was rescued, the baby was still attached to the placenta. Normally the placenta is not expelled from the mother for between 15 and 30 minutes after the baby is born.

The mother says she conceived the child during a one-night stand with a man who wanted nothing to do with the child. She says she was unable to afford an abortion.

The baby was admitted to the hospital in critical condition with a suspected fracture in the top of his skull after spending at least several hours wedged in the sewage pipe in the Chinese province of Zhajiang.

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Firefighters rescued the baby by sawing apart the section of the pipe in which the baby was lodged, and then removing it piece by piece with pliars.  

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Since then the condition of the baby – who has been named No. 59, after the number of his hospital incubator – and hospital staff say he is well enough to be discharged.  

“His condition is good but his relatives have not come to pick him up yet,” hospital head Wu Xinhong told AFP. 

Firefighters responded to a call from the building landlord who reported hearing a baby crying in the toilet on the fourth floor. 

A nurse told the Daily Mail that numerous individuals have stepped forward to donate diapers, formula, and other necessities to help care for the child. Some have offered to adopt the child. 

Video of the dramatic rescue shows firefighters sawing and removing the section of pipe in which the baby was wedged. This section of pipe was then sent to a nearby hospital, where  workers removed the pipe piece by piece.

The infant was still attached to the placenta. 

Cases of newborn infants being abandoned are not unheard of in China. In fact, Jinhua is the same city where one Chinese woman rescued 30 babies who were abandoned in the trash. Despite her meager living recycling trash, Lou Xiaoying brought home and cared for all the abandoned infants she came across.  

Under China’s one-child policy parents must obtain a pregnancy permit or face severe penalties, and it is estimated that some 35,000 abortions are committed per day in the country – many of them forced. Investigations have revealed that human rights abuses under the policy are rampant, with family planning police often dealing with “illegal pregnancies” through forced abortions and infanticide. 

Last year, outrage shook the Internet when it was revealed a premature baby girl in Anshan city, Liaoning province, had been thrown in the trash with umbilical cord still attached, in a plastic bag with her throat cut. Doctors said she would have died of suffocation within minutes, and had the cut been any deeper, it would certainly have taken the baby girl’s life.