It’s so disturbing it’s hard to comprehend – just hours after giving birth, a mother pushes her tiny baby boy down a 2.4m stormwater drain, leaving him for dead.
In a crime that has shocked Australia, a Quakers Hill, NSW, woman stands accused of doing exactly that after a traumatic 30-hour labour.
The baby – who can’t be named for legal reasons – is thought to have been left in that drain for five excruc””iating days, until passing cyclists heard his cries and the severely dehydrated tot was plucked to safety.
While hoping he makes a full recovery, some Aussies have taken to blogs expressing anger and resentment, lashing out at the 30-year-old mum who has been charged with attempted murder.
But Steve Hardy who was himself abandoned as a baby in a Sydney movie theatre by his own biological mother, takes a different approach.
“We couldn’t even imagine the state she’s in,” he says of the Quakers Hill mum. “She deserves to be given help.”
Steve still longs to find his mother and, speaking of his own experience, he says: “As I’ve grown up I’ve always wondered why my mother did that and I had many scenarios about how she felt, but in none of them did I believe that she was evil.
“I always thought she had problems, whether it was society, whether it was not being able to care for the baby, whatever. I’m 65 and I still don’t hold any animosity, and my sisters and brother don’t either.”
The sisters and brother Steve speaks of, Gary, Kim and Julie, were also left helpless in various locations around Sydney by their mum, who they believe to be Valerie Mirams, who would now be 84.
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