There’s a veritable epidemic of babies being flushed down train toilets.

First there was the December case of the Taiwanese woman who gave birth in the toilet of a busy commuter train. It ended well, after workers successfully extricated a newborn girl from the lavatory plumbing. No wrongdoing was alleged, and mother and daughter are both doing fine. The Taiwan Railway Administration even gave the family free passes for future train rides. Careful in the bathroom next time, ma’am.

Toilet Baby Number Two

Now comes a more serious story from Ahmadabad, India. A young pregnant woman named Bhuri Kalbi was traveling overnight with her family when she fell ill. She entered the bathroom and delivered prematurely before fainting.

But unlike the case in Taiwan, toilets in many Indian trains are essentially chutes which pass waste directly to the tracks below. By the time she regained consciousness, the baby was nowhere to be found.

Family members pulled the trains emergency brake, and engineers radioed back to the previous station. A search was launched. The news was finally relayed that the baby had been found lying between the tracks — alive. The girl was 8 to 10 weeks premature and weighed just over three pounds.

… And a Second Happy Ending

Indian officials don’t doubt Kalbi’s story, and the baby was last reported recovering well from complications related to her early birth.

Here’s mother and child at a hospital in Ahmadabad (Reuters photo by Amit Dave).

Link: BBC News