On May 11, a 3-day-old baby girl was found abandoned on the stoop of a building in Flushing, Queens, along with a bag full of diapers and formula.

A day later, police found the mother, a 31-year-old named Hua Zheng, by using information on the hospital bracelet the baby still wore. (Oops.) They also had surveillance video footage of her leaving the hospital with the baby – on Mother's Day.

Zheng is married, and her husband reportedly told her to get an abortion because they couldn't afford to have a child. Doctors told Zheng she was too far along to have the procedure, so she, "lied to her husband and hid her pregnancy." Presumably Zheng told him she had gotten an abortion, then had the baby and left her outside. How she would be able to hide all of this, I don't know.

There are slightly conflicting reports depending on which source you read. The Daily News says that Zheng and her husband have a 2-year-old boy who had been sent to live in China because they couldn't afford to raise him here. CBS News said that the stoop was chosen at random. But Newsday tells us that Kristina Yu, the woman who found the baby on her doorstep, was the babysitter for Zheng's son. It's possible that she used to babysit the son, and then he went to live in China. In the CBS story, Yu said that she couldn't determine the baby's ethnicity: "It looked like it could be an Asian baby. It looked like it could be a mix. I'm not sure."

Once again, as in the "taxi baby" case, the Safe Haven law rears its head. Since Zheng left the baby on a stoop, she will be charged with a crime. If she had brought the girl to the hospital, she would have been able to walk away, no questions asked.

image: amny.com