Man Finds Abandoned Baby Dumped by Side of the Road in Thailand, Has Her Rushed to Hospital

Illustration - Flaviya/Shutterstock

A newborn baby with her umbilical cord still attached was abandoned by the roadside in Chiang Mai, Thailand, but was miraculously found alive after a local spotted her blanket. After the baby girl’s photo reached local news media, the birth mother came forward to claim her.

In early May 2020, American expat Eric Ransdell was walking home when he spotted the bundle under a patch of roadside shrubbery. “I walked over and I was afraid it was dead, but it was moving its hands,” Ransdell explained in footage from the scene shared by Viral Press online.

Ransdell found the hours-old baby girl wrapped in a black-and-red cotton blanket near a pile of old tires. The expat enlisted the help of his neighbor, who called her mother, and then the emergency services.

“Thankfully the baby’s okay,” said Ransdell. The infant was rushed to nearby Nakornping Hospital, where she had her temperature scanned—a precautionary measure during the current virus pandemic—and was greeted by medics from the ICU.

“Everybody just did a great job,” Ransdell praised. “The police did a great job, the emergency tech people did a great job, they were here super fast ... incredibly professional.”

On May 14, Ransdell posted an update on the baby’s condition to Instagram: “Some good news for these dark days,” he wrote. “I saw the baby at Nakornping Hospital this afternoon.”

“They weren’t going to let me in because of COVID-19,” Ransdell continued, “but one nurse had seen the story on the local news and so they made an exception. Happy to report the baby is in the infants’ ICU and doing well.”

Staff were treating the baby girl with a program of antibiotics but were otherwise confident that she was healthy. “They still don’t know her exact age,” Ransdell wrote, “though the head ICU nurse told me she’s fairly certain she was either a newborn or less than 48 hours old.”

Before leaving the hospital, Ransdell met with a woman from Chiang Mai social services, who explained that the baby would shortly be transferred to an infant-care facility next to the hospital for up to a month.

“After that, there is a home for infants run by the government where she will stay while the police try to locate the mother,” said Ransdell.

Local authorities speculated that the mother may be hard to find, according to the Mirror. “We suspect that the mother’s incentive to leave her baby might be that she is in poverty and struggling to pay her bills due to the pandemic,” said police lieutenant Thanchanok Phromraj, “or, it was an unexpected baby and she did not want anybody to know.”

Ransdell maintained that she was a “very lucky baby” to have been found and cared for in the nick of time.

On May 26, the American expat took to Instagram with another update. This time, the news entailed a heartwarming reunion.

“I am happy to report the baby, whose name (for the moment) is ‘Nong Nong,’ and her mother have been reunited,” Ransdell began, adding that the story was a “strange” one.

Nong Nong’s mother, a 21-year-old from Shan State in neighboring Myanmar, had the baby on her own and lost consciousness during childbirth. When she woke up, she claimed her daughter wasn’t breathing and feared the baby had died.

“[S]he was distraught,” Ransdell continued, “and decided to take her baby to the local Buddhist temple to have the body cremated when she happened upon a female garbage collector who offered to help. What happened after that is still very unclear.”

Hours later, Ransdell found Nong Nong abandoned by the side of the road near his home. A photo of the baby girl reached a local online newspaper; the baby’s mother saw the photo and recognized her black-and-red cotton blanket.

Upon the realization that her baby had survived, Ransdell wrote, Nong Nong’s mother “immediately went to Nakornping Hospital and claimed her child.”