Unwanted babies still being dumped in dumpsters.

In May 2010, I wrote an article in my blog titled: A refuge for unwanted babies should be in every city. Alas, unwanted babies are still sometimes dumped in dumpsters rather than left at a refuge in a hospital or a church.

An hours-old baby boy was rescued from a dumpster in Calgary Alberta in October 2010 by his unknowing father, who only realized the child was his after he suddenly recognized the trash inside the garbage bag. The infant, who is believed to have been delivered into a toilet, was alive even though his mother allegedly cut his umbilical cord with tweezers.

One year after the boy was found in a Calgary housing complex, the woman is accused of killing two other babies whose bodies have never been recovered. Meredith Katharine Borowiec, 30, who lives in the city’s northwest, now faces two second-degree murder charges as well as the attempted murder charge police laid last week after what one sergeant called a “very stressful, long investigation.”

The investigation began on October 19th, 2010, the day police say Ms. Borowiec delivered a six-pound boy alone in her apartment, before placing the baby and a towel into the bathroom garbage.

Court documents obtained by the Calgary Herald paint a disturbing picture of her actions: After transferring the boy into a larger kitchen bag filled with other refuse, then dumping the child in the dumpster, Ms. Borowiec smoked a cigarette and watched television. It was not until two men found the baby moving in the bin that she emerged from the apartment and sat on the steps in blood-covered pants. In a twist, one of those men was the boy’s father — a man who says he never knew his girlfriend was pregnant. This is obviously a woman who has no appreciation of human life, not even when that human being is one she gave birth too.

Ms. Borowiec told police that the baby was quiet and still when he was born. She said she did not know she was pregnant, although she said she had once been six months’ pregnant and miscarried in 2009. Give me a break. How could a woman who is about to give birth to a baby not know that she is pregnant, especially when she had given birth to other babies?

The story gained international attention when it was covered by Fox News. It also captured the attention of Canadians across the country.

Announcing the second-degree murder charges against Ms. Borowiec, Sergeant Kelly Campbell of the Child Abuse Unit acknowledged it would be “difficult” but “not impossible” to proceed with the prosecution without the bodies of the other two alleged victims.

Witnesses suggested Ms. Borowiec had given birth to two other babies, she said, adding it would “be highly unlikely to recover the bodies due to the length of time and not knowing where these bodies are.” Sgt. Campbell would not say whether Ms. Borowiec had admitted to the alleged 2008 and 2009 killings, saying only the woman “has been co-operative through the investigation.”

The day after he rescued his son, the boy’s father — who cannot be named to protect the baby’s identity — said he had received a call from a friend of Ms. Borowiec’s saying she suspected the 2010 alleged abandonment was not her first.

Unlike other mothers who abandoned their children, Ms. Borowiec is facing murder charges rather than infanticide — when a mother through a “willful act or omission” causes the death of a newborn under 12 months because “her mind was disturbed” as result of childbirth or nursing.

This year, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld infanticide as a defence, refusing to hear the Crown’s appeal in the case of a 19-year-old Ontario woman who had been found guilty of infanticide for killing two of her babies.

The 19-year-old Edmonton woman received a three-year suspended sentence for strangling her newborn son and tossing the body over her backyard fence in 2005. She was twice convicted of second-degree murder by two separate juries, but the convictions were overturned on appeal.

The charges against Ms. Borowiec come just months after the first infant was left at Canada’s first and only safe drop-off, where parents can safely abandon unwanted children. The safe-haven concept, which was pioneered in Canada at Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital, is lauded for protecting the most vulnerable — and condemned for normalizing abandonment. The “Angel’s Cradle” concept is now under consideration in Alberta, where a Roman Catholic organization called Covenant Health is working to launch a safe haven in Edmonton.

“When I hear a story like this, I wonder whether we’ve done everything we can to make sure these people don’t fall through the cracks,” said Gordon Self, Covenant’s vice-president of mission, ethics and spirituality. “We think of the poor, vulnerable baby left all alone in an unsafe environment, but I also think of the parents who are equally vulnerable and may feel they have nowhere to turn.”

In addition to the attempted murder charge in the October 2010 case, Ms. Borowiec is also charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm, child abandonment and failure to provide the necessities of life for a child under 16. This terrible woman isn’t the first pregnant woman to throw her unwanted newborn baby into a dumpster.

Colleen Smith, a 22-year-old woman living in the residence of the Buffalo State College delivered a full-term baby girl into the toilet of her dorm bathroom. Later, she wrapped the baby in a green towel and plastic bags and threw her into a dumpster near her dorm. She too claimed that she didn’t know that she was in labour. In such cases, a woman goes about in a state of perpetual delusion knowing she's pregnant deep down, but unable to bring herself to imagine the birth of her baby or what might happen afterward.

Her baby died and she was charged with second degree murder but pleaded guilty to attempted murder which would give her a sentence of only three and a half years in prison.
Like Smith's, babies in neonaticide cases often are delivered into toilets. The babies choke, sputter, cry and then drown. Time stops. The young women sit and cry, overwhelmed by pain they can hardly comprehend. comprehend.

They wouldn’t have to go through this trauma if they saw a doctor when it became obvious that they were pregnant.

On September 11, 2011, Lindsey Brooke Lowe, 25, gave birth to twins on a toilet in her parents’ home. She smothered them both and left their bodies in her bedroom laundry hamper.

Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson , both being 20, were sentenced in Wilmington, Delaware to a couple years in prison after the college students and former high-school sweethearts pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of their newborn son in a motel in 1996.

Christina Marie Fiske, 22, a former Western Carolina University student plead guilty to killing her 6.5 pound newborn baby girl. Fiske admitted killing her shortly after birth and bagging her with her trash.

Experts attribute the rise in the infanticide cases to social and psychological factors. “There can be two causes—social and psychological,” said Dr. Saroj Prasad Ojha, Professor of Psychiatry at the Teaching Hospital at Maharajgunj, an old suburb in Hyderabad, India. He said, “Depression and psychosis might sometime work as the pushing factor for a mother to kill a child. On the other hand, social causes like society’s perception on an illegal child, the deeply entrenched poverty, husbands being abroad, unemployment, attitude of the society towards girls, can force individuals to take extreme measures.”

As a father of two girls and a grandfather of five grandchildren, I find it extremely difficult to excuse mothers who murder their newborn babies, no matter what their reasons are. If they don’t want their babies then they should give them up for adoption. There are thousands of childless couples who would love to have a baby given up for adoption.

As far as I am concerned, a pregnant woman who kills her newborn baby is a very evil person. I don’t care what their psychiatrists say. Killing a newborn baby is an evil act and such persons deserve to be punished by being sent to prison. If you doubt this, consider this next rhetorical question. “Would you be reading this article if your mother killed you right after you were born?