A week-old baby boy was left in a room for abandoned children in Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, just hours after the "safe haven" opened on Tuesday.

A "safe haven" for abandoned children in eastern Nanjing City. Just hours after work on the room finished on Tuesday, it received its first abandoned baby, a week-old boy.

The room at the gate of the Nanjing Social Children's Welfare Center is air-conditioned and equipped with a cradle and incubator which can maintain moderate temperatures and humidity.

Work on the room in the security guards' building had been completed on Tuesday afternoon. At around 6:30pm, an alarm sounded and the guard found the boy and alerted welfare center officials, China News Service reported yesterday.

Zhu Hong, director of the center, said the boy's family might have decided to leave the baby there after seeing a news item about the safe haven where an alarm is sounded three minutes after a button is pressed in the room.

The center said the baby will undergo checks to see if he has any medical problems.

No note was left with the baby so his name and exact date of birth are not known.

Shijiazhuang in northern Hebei Province was the first city in China to open a safe haven. On Children's Day in 2011, the city's welfare center set one up at its gate.

By October this year, it had received 181 children, according to a People's Daily report.

Han Jinhong, head of the center, said most of the children left there were severely ill or disabled and their families would not have been able to afford the medical bills.

Over the past two years, the number of abandoned babies had remained stable in Shijiazhuang, Han said, responding to concerns that safe havens might actually encourage people to abandon their babies.

The southern city of Shenzhen will launch a safe haven facility next year.

Tang Rongsheng, director of the Shenzhen Welfare Center, said ill and disabled children would have better chances of survival and receive the treatment they needed in time if they were left there.

"Some people claim we are conniving in the act of throwing away babies.

"But the facts are that many babies are either abandoned in litter bins or thrown away and freeze to death outside hospitals," he told the Yangcheng Evening News.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)