A young woman amazed the Chinese internet last week with her kindness by breastfeeding a baby girl who had been abandoned on the street by her parents.
A crying baby girl wrapped up in a quilt and left abandoned inside a box on a Xianyang street corner, with only a bag of milk and a 100-yuan note, was discovered by a couple of passersby last week, NetEase reports.
The baby’s cries soon drew a larger crowd of people, who tried to comfort the infant with water and shade, but despite their best efforts, the baby just kept crying.
Until, a young woman stepped forward and started to breastfeed the child, finally calming the infant down.
Police soon arrived and took the baby to a welfare home. Social workers there told reporters that the child likely has cerebral palsy, making her one of the tens of thousands of disabled children that are abandoned by their parents each year in China.
Photos of the woman’s act of kindness went viral on Chinese social media, with many netizens writing in to praise the mom — much like last year’s “angel nurse,” who breastfed a crying infant during surgery:
“There is nothing greater than a mother’s love,” one netizen commented.
“This woman embodies what it means to be a mother,” another agreed.
While most netizens were busy praising the young woman, others blasted the parents of the abandoned child. In a 2014 report, the China Philanthropy Research Institute, which works with UNICEF to produce the annual China Child Welfare Policy Report, estimated that the number of disabled children abandoned by their parents is increasing by 30,000 to 50,000 every year.
To deal with this growing problem, some Chinese cities have introduced “baby abandonment” centers, where parents could leave their unwanted children anonymously, rather than just dumping them on the curb or burying them alive. In its first 13 days in operation, one of these centers in Guangzhou received 51 kids.
Fortunately, some generous people have taken it upon themselves to help, like one Shanxi couple who has adopted over 40 disabled orphans in the past 26 years, and this former millionaire who went into debt after taking in 75 abandoned children.
[Images via NetEase]
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