Search underway for plane baby's mom

MANILA, Philippines - As another baby was found abandoned yesterday, airport authorities searched for a 30-year-old woman who might be the mother of George Francis, the newborn who was left in the lavatory garbage bin of a Gulf Air plane that landed in Manila last Sunday.

Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA) general    manager Jose Honrado said they are searching for a passenger who arrived last Sunday on board Gulf Air flight GF 154 and who was seated at 40D where blood stains were seen.

Honrado said the mother will remain unnamed until they have conducted an investigation.

He said the Airport Police Department (APD) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) are coordinating to identify the mother who abandoned her child after delivering him at the tail section of the A330 that arrived from Bahrain at 11:18 a.m.

“We will withhold her identity until the proper investigation is conducted,” Honrado said, adding that the passenger’s address was purposely left vacant in the immigration arrival card that is usually filled out by passengers.

The mother deliberately only indicated her date of birth and passport number and did not answer the rest of the questions, an immigration official said.

Airport doctors said there is a big probability that somebody helped the mother before and after her delivery of the child, adding that it would have been very difficult for the mother to have gone out of the plane without any companion and not losing consciousness.

An official of the DSWD, Celia Yangco, said the baby is in good health.

“The baby is now under our care,” she said. “We’ll look for his mother. We’re giving his mother a chance to come forward.”

Radio stations in Manila were swamped with offers to adopt the boy, who officials have called George Francis, using the initials of Gulf’s airline code, but Yangco said the government wants to try to find the biological mother first.

“We have a process to follow before the baby is declared abandoned and set for adoption,” Yangco said, adding that state policy is to keep the family together.

Meantime, another newborn was found abandoned in a garbage heap along Blumentritt Street in Sta. Cruz yesterday morning.

The baby is said to be in stable condition at the Chinese General Hospital. Hospital staff refused to entertain the media yesterday.

Passersby in the area reportedly heard the crying of a baby at a garbage heap. When they tried to look for the source of the cry, they found the baby girl among plastic wrappers in the garbage pile.

Not the solution

An official of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) urged mothers who can no longer take care of their children to bring them to concerned institutions instead of just abandoning them in dangerous and dirty places.

“Abandoning a child is not the solution… the mother should instead leave him to an institution: be it a government-run or Church-run institution,” Fr. Melvin Castro, executive secretary of the CBCP’s Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, said in a phone interview.

Labor officials, on the other hand, admitted yesterday that the act of leaving a newborn in the toilet trash can of a plane was a negative outcome of migration, which is considered as the country’s economic backbone.

“I think it is part of the social problem of migration, but this is also an isolated case,” Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE)-Communication Office director Nicon Fameronag explained. According to Fameronag, the mother of the baby boy is probably married and had an illicit relationship while working abroad. – With Mayen Jaymalin, Helen Flores, Nestor Etolle