A cleaner has told of finding an abandoned baby in an aircraft toilet rubbish bin as an MP called for more open discussions about sex to prevent Samoan women from dumping babies.
The cleaner, a Samoan trained nurse, saw the baby's arm move in the bin about 20 minutes after the Pacific Blue flight from Apia landed in Auckland Thursday morning.
She closed the lid of the 50 litre rubbish bin and called out to her co-workers "there's a baby in the rubbish", an airline industry source told The Dominion Post.
Another Samoan cleaner took the girl, who was surrounded by bloody tissue paper, out of the blue rubbish bag and wrapped the baby in a blanket.
The woman who found her cut the umbilical cord then the cleaners gave the baby to a flight attendant who handed her to ambulance staff.
Staff were amazed to see the baby was in good health, the source told the paper.
The mother had been in the toilet for about 10 minutes after the plane landed and the other passengers left.
Officials found her in the airport looking pale and bloodstained. She and the baby were taken to Auckland's Middlemore Hospital.
The woman is still recovering but Police have said she is likely to face charges.
Mangere MP Samoan Su'a William Sio said cultural stigma and the shame of having a child while unmarried were two of the reasons young women in Samoa and New Zealand dumped their children.
"This is mostly derived firstly by fear - fear that they've done something wrong and fear of shame of the `unmarried' mother bringing to the family," he told the New Zealand Herald.
In 2007 a 22-year-old Samoan student was convicted of infanticide after throwing her dead newborn out a window of a Dunedin hostel in a plastic bag.
She had told the court she was ashamed of her pregnancy which had occurred from her first sexual encounter.
Mr Sio said Pacific parents often tended to shy away from discussing sex with their children, which made it difficult for young unmarried women who found themselves pregnant.
NZPA