Abandoned baby girl back with mother

Press, 19 September 1985, Page 2

Abandoned baby girl back with mother

PA Auckland A baby girl abandoned at Middlemore Hospital early this year is back in the arms of the mother who left her. The infant, nicknamed “Baby Lu” by hospital and Social Welfare Department staff, now has a real name, Heather. A social worker, Mrs Eileen Webb, said the baby’s mother was a Samoan, aged 20, who left her new-born child in February thinking she could not keep it because she was a solo mother. She expected relatives to pick it up from the hospital for adoption. Mrs Webb said the

mother was a “sweet, unsophisticated girl” who spoke English quite well but was confused by legal processes. This explained her delay in claiming the child and her failure to appear at two court hearings to discuss its future. A District Court judge gave the department cus-

tody of the baby with leave to place it in a home. The child, now about six months old, was to be put in foster care but during talks with foster parents the mother showed herself to be “a natural mother”. Mrs Webb said the mother had wanted her baby adopted but she “had

not realised the options open to her. “She has a lot of support behind her now from the right sort of people. She is meeting the needs of her child and she is a lovely little mother,” she said. The mother will appear in court again in November when her custody of the child will be reviewed. Two other abandoned babies — Baby Helen, found under a park hedge in December, and Baby Terry, found in January beside a creek — are still in the care of the Social Welfare Department because their mothers have not been found.