Infanticide, foundlings, and the education we keep postponing

 I've spent decades recovering abandoned babies, sitting with mothers once they're traced, and adopting children of my own. These cases share a root, and we keep refusing to name it.

From Hartini Zainudin

Last Thursday, a newborn boy was found alive in a box under the stairs of a Kepong apartment block. The next morning, a baby girl was found dead in a rubbish bin at a Bangsar waste site.

Police are investigating the first case under Section 317 of the Penal Code for abandonment of a child, and the second under Section 318 for concealment of birth.

Two babies, found a day and a few kilometres apart. One will grow up as a foundling, the other never got that chance.

I have spent much of my working life between these two outcomes: recovering abandoned babies, sitting with mothers once they are traced, and raising children of my own through adoption.

These cases share a root, and we keep refusing to name it.

Infanticide begins long before the birth

The women, family and community development ministry recorded 72 baby dumping cases in 2025 and 18 in the first quarter of 2026. Selangor alone logged 43 last year. These are only the babies we know about. Concealed births and deaths that never reach the police sit outside every statistic.

Our law already accepts that infanticide differs from murder. Section 309A of the Penal Code applies when a mother causes the death of her newborn while her mind is disturbed by childbirth. Legislators wrote that provision because they understood something our public conversation still ignores: women in these cases are usually in crisis themselves.

In my experience, they are young — often teenagers — and have hidden the pregnancy for months, sometimes even from themselves. They have seen no doctor and give birth alone, in a bathroom or a hostel room, in pain and terror.

Some of them became pregnant through rape or incest by someone in the same house. Some are migrant workers who know a pregnancy can cost them a permit, a job and a roof in the same week. By the time the baby arrives, months of silence have done their work. Panic does the rest.

We respond by hunting for them. A police appeal goes out, the comment sections demand the harshest punishment, and every other frightened girl in Malaysia learns one lesson: better to hide.

The boy in Kepong survived the box. He now faces a slower danger.

The Federal Constitution was written with children like him in mind. Section 19B of Part III of the Second Schedule presumes that a newborn found abandoned was born here to a mother who is a permanent resident.

Section 1(e) of Part II makes anyone born in Malaysia who is not a citizen of any other country a citizen by operation of law. Together, they are meant to ensure that no abandoned child in Malaysia grows up stateless.

In 2024, the government proposed amendments that would have weakened both protections. Civil society, including many of us who worked with foundlings for decades, pushed back hard, and those changes were withdrawn before the bill passed. The safeguards stand.

Where they fail is in practice. Foundlings still leave hospitals with undetermined citizenships. Families who adopt them wait years for documents. Some children reach school age, then adulthood, unable to prove what the constitution already says they are.

What that does to a child

A foundling without citizenship pays foreigner rates at government hospitals. He may struggle to sit for public examinations, apply for a scholarship, open a bank account, marry legally or register the birth of his own children. Statelessness travels down generations.

He also carries the story. Adopted and fostered children eventually ask where they came from, and the answer begins with a box, a drain or a surau doorstep.

What we owe that child is a life in which that beginning does not decide everything that follows: a name, a nationality, a family and a fair start. Whether he gets them depends on paperwork handled by adults he will never meet.

The education we keep postponing

Almost every case I have handled traces back to the same gap.

A girl who does not understand her own body cannot recognise a pregnancy early. A girl who has never been told that what her uncle or stepfather does to her is abuse, does not know she can report it.

A boy who has never learned about consent does not see himself as responsible. A young woman who has never heard of confidential health services does not know which door to walk through.

Malaysian schools do teach reproductive health, but too often it is diluted, rushed or delivered only as a moral warning, by teachers who were never trained to teach it.

Young people end up learning about sex from friends and online, and learning about pregnancy too late.

International evidence, including Unesco’s reviews of sexuality education programmes, shows that age-appropriate education does not make young people more sexually active. It helps them delay sex, protect themselves, and recognise and report abuse.

For a girl living with incest, knowing the words for what is happening to her can be the difference between a police report and a hidden pregnancy.

What must change

1. Comprehensive, age-appropriate sexuality and consent education in every school, taught by trained teachers, with parents brought in from the start.
2. Confidential crisis pregnancy care inside the public health system, so a girl can deliver safely in hospital and relinquish her baby lawfully without being treated as a suspect.
3. A welfare-first protocol: a mother who is traced sees a doctor and a social worker before a police investigating officer.
4. Automatic citizenship for every foundling at birth registration: apply Sections 19B and 1(e) as written. No child should need a lawyer or an NGO to claim what the constitution already guarantees.
5. Track the survivors: where foundlings are placed, whether they are adopted, and whether they ever receive a MyKad.

A name

This week, a welfare department officer will choose a name for the boy from Kepong. It will go on a form beside a blank space where his mother’s name should be. Whether the line below it reads “warganegara” is up to us.

The baby girl from Bangsar will need a name too, for a grave.

Both were failed long before they were found: by classrooms that stayed silent, clinics their mothers did not know they could enter, and a system that protects foundlings on paper and abandons them in practice.

We know where the failures are. We have known for years. - FMT

Hartini Zainudin is co-founder of Yayasan Chow Kit, founder of Kasih Madhya, and co-founder of Voice of the Children.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT