Crying From the Rubbish: Newborn Girls Abandoned in Samut Prakan

In Samut Prakan, the industrial belt south of Bangkok, the same scene keeps returning to local news: a cry that is not a cat, a bag or a towel in a place meant for waste, an umbilical cord still attached.

On 23 December 2020 a resident in a block of flats came downstairs because the neighbourhood cats would not stop. He then heard a baby. A newborn girl lay on a bench in the cold, a black garbage bag beside her, cord uncut. He wrapped her and called police and rescuers. Volunteers stimulated her until she cried hard. A nurse clamped the cord. Samrong Tai police pulled CCTV to look for the mother.

In late January 2026 another live girl was found on a roadside rubbish pile near a golf course in the Bang Bo area of the same province: wrapped in a single towel, blood still on the skin, cord still on the navel, crying in the sun. A security guard and a drink vendor reached her first. Bang Bo Hospital emergency crews took over. She was described as red, loud and intact.

Ruamkatanyu Foundation and other volunteer rescue groups are the ones who usually arrive before a district hospital incubator does: clear the mouth, wipe with saline, wrap, drive. Pediatric staff then finish the cord, start fluids and look for trauma. In the cases that make the news as “rescued,” doctors often report no broken bones — only the risk that minutes more in a closed bag or under heat would have ended the story as another forensic bag at Ramathibodi Chakri Naruebodindra.

Thai law treats abandoning a newborn as a crime. Police check cameras. Mothers who are found sometimes cite money, a husband working in another province, a birth in a toilet. Many are never identified. Other Samut Prakan reports from the same years are not rescues. They are bodies in plastic in canals, compactors and market bins.

The caption’s “housing-complex trash bin” is the shape of these cases, not a single unique file number. What is documented is repeated: a girl who was still breathing because someone opened the bag in time, and a system that can stabilize an airway faster than it can stop the next abandonment.

Sources

• Thai Newsroom / Sanook, 23 December 2020: newborn girl found in Samut Prakan with cord attached; rescuers and CCTV.
• Khao Sod and Channel 7, 25–26 January 2026: live newborn girl on a garbage pile, Bang Bo, Samut Prakan; towel, cord, hospital transfer.
• Local reports of Ruamkatanyu and municipal rescue responses to infant-abandonment calls in Samut Prakan.