By Mohammad Ghazal

AMMAN - A newborn baby girl was found early Sunday in a bathroom at Al Bashir Hospital emergency room after she was abandoned by her mother.

The baby was discovered by janitors around 3:00am as they were cleaning the toilets, Hospital Director Mohammad Rawabdeh told The Jordan Times yesterday. The baby was found shivering and covered in blood as the umbilical cord was cut in a “primitive method”, Rawabdeh said.

It is the fourth abandoned infant to be found in less than four months.

“We carried out the necessary medical checkup for the baby which was shivering due to the cold weather,” Rawabdeh said, noting that the 2.35-kilogramme baby girl was in good and stable condition.

One hour after the girl was found, the police arrested a woman who later confessed she had the baby out of wedlock, the official added.

The 24-year-old suspect said she gave birth in the hospital restroom with the help of her mother, Rawabdeh said, adding that blood tests confirmed she was in fact the mother.

“The woman came to the emergency room and told the doctors on duty she was suffering from pains in her stomach. A doctor asked her to provide a urine sample for test purposes. While in the bathroom, she delivered the baby and her mother helped her cut the umbilical cord and flee,” Rawabdeh explained.

Currently, the young mother is being hospitalised for extensive blood loss. She will be later handed over to police for further investigation.

On December 6, police arrested the unmarried parents of a baby boy who was found inside a black plastic bag dumped under the Abdoun Suspension Bridge.

Also, on December 5 the police announced the arrest of a woman in Southern Shuneh, who threw a newborn baby into a sewage tank resulting in his immediate death Police investigations revealed that the woman’s daughter gave birth to the baby boy out of wedlock.

Late September, a baby girl was found in a trash bin in Jabal Amman. The infant was the daughter of an unmarried couple, who were then put under custody and charged with committing adultery by the Amman prosecutor general.

According to relatives and neighbours, the 23-year-old father had proposed to the 21-year-old mother twice but her family refused.

Unable to obtain consent for their marriage, the young couple began an affair over two years ago that left her pregnant, neighbours and relatives said.