COTABATO CITY, 29 September 2005 — Philippine police yesterday said they were looking for the mother of a newborn baby boy found dead on a bed of lilies at a river in the southern province of Maguindanao.
Officials said the baby, wrapped in cellophane bag, was found by residents of Kalinangan village in the outskirts of Cotabato City on Mindanao island.
Police suspect the baby was a victim of forced abortion.
“We are searching for the baby’s mother and the abortionist and have alerted police units in the area to help us find the culprits of this unimaginable crime,” Inspector Samson Obatay told Arab News.
Dozens of villagers guarded the corpse from wild dogs and birds and some offered prayers until policemen arrived.
“I thought it was a dead fish because the birds are hovering it and the dogs are just nearby. I was shocked to find it was a baby’s corpse and I called for help and we guarded it until the police arrived,” a villager named Suha said.
Police said the baby had a hole near the right temple. “We don’t know what really happened to the baby’s head. The injury could have been from the instruments used to pull the baby from the mother’s womb,” Obatay said.
Obatay blamed unwanted pregnancies and poverty as the main cause of abortion.
The Human Life International, the world’s largest international pro-life organization, said that about 200,000 abortions are performed annually in the Philippines and about 98 percent of them involved abortion drugs.
An eight-month old fetus was recovered in March in nearby Kidapawan City.
It was half-eaten by stray dogs when villagers found the fetus abandoned near the road. Another fetus was left abandoned in a bag inside a shopping mall in Cagayan de Oro City in northern Mindanao also in March, police said.
In February, a 23-year old woman in Cebu province died after using a dangerous abortion drug RU 486, which according to website of the New York State Right to Life Committee, has been responsible for numerous deaths around the world.
Relatives found the woman’s body in a pool of blood and her dead unborn was not completely expelled from her womb.
Doctors said the woman lost too much blood to survive the failed abortion and doctors told the police that the woman used drugs commonly prescribed to treat ulcers.
