Six months in jail for mom who dumped baby in drain

The Newlands, Durban, mother who dumped her newborn baby into a stormwater drain in February last year will serve, at most, six months in prison. The baby survived the ordeal.

The 33-year-old woman, who has never been named to protect the identity of her two older children, was sentenced in the Ntuzuma magistrate’s court on Friday to three years in jail. In terms of legislation which permits the sentence to be converted to house arrest, she might end up spending a few months behind the bars.

Earlier this year, she pleaded guilty to a charge of attempt murder of her newborn daughter.

She described how she had been ashamed of falling pregnant again, after having already had two children with two different fathers. She concealed the pregnancy and gave birth alone in a dark passageway of the block of flats where she lived.

“I became emotionally overwhelmed by a feeling of abandonment and desperation. I sat on my own for almost an hour,” she said before deciding to find a “suitable place where I could take my baby where she would hopefully be discovered and my pregnancy would go undetected”.

She first went to a school and a church but could not gain access to either premises. She said she then “stopped thinking logically” and wrapped the baby in a plastic packet and placed her on a concrete ledge inside the storm water drain.

She later joined a large crowd of people who had gathered to witness a four-hour rescue of the baby. The mother went to Addington Hospital several times in the hope of hearing news of how the baby was doing. The next weekend she confessed to her uncle, a police officer, that she was the mother of the “storm baby”.

Ntuzuma magistrate Erenskia la Grange took cognisance of submissions made by the woman’s attorney, Jacques Botha, that his client was a “desperate person”, and that she was not a criminal who needed to be removed from society for a long time.

Botha conceded that the survival of the child was extremely fortuitous and there were other lawful options available to her at the time, but said his client had expressed remorse and had not wasted the court’s time.