Earlier this month, a newborn baby was found abandoned in a garbage bin in Lahore’s Allama Iqbal Town. Police have been informed, and legal proceedings are expected, though the baby’s condition remains undisclosed. For a society that claims reverence for life, the image of a newborn discarded among refuse should have triggered outrage. Instead, it has been met largely with weary resignation.
What makes this incident especially disturbing is that it is no longer exceptional. In early January, Rescue 1122 responders retrieved a newborn from a waste container in Raza Block, Allama Iqbal Town, rushing the infant to Jinnah Hospital. Days earlier, a similar call led to another abandoned baby being saved in the same locality.
In Attock, police found a newborn, eventually handing the child over to the Child Protection Bureau after no claimant emerged. Last year, residents near Gajjumata Chowk heard desperate cries from inside a plastic bag — an infant girl sealed and discarded as if she were refuse. The repetition is what should alarm us. These cases span cities, districts and months, pointing not to individual moral collapse alone but to a social one.
Abandoning a child is a crime. But law enforcement alone cannot address the root causes driving desperate parents — often mothers with no safety net — to acts of abandonment. Pakistan’s child protection framework, though improved on paper, remains reactive rather than preventive. Crisis counselling for pregnant women and safe shelters are either absent or unevenly implemented.
What should be done is neither radical nor unknown. Pakistan needs accessible, confidential support systems for pregnant women in crisis, including counselling and medical care without fear of stigma or prosecution. Safe and anonymous child surrender mechanisms must be introduced and clearly publicised, allowing infants to be handed over to the state without being dumped in life-threatening conditions.
Editorial Published in Express Tribune on January 25th, 2026.
