Woman gets 42 months in prison for abandoning newborn to die outdoors

A woman has been sentenced to three years and six months in prison for abandoning her newborn son outdoors shortly after giving birth, causing the infant to die of hypothermia.

The Daegu District Court’s Gyeongju branch sentenced the foreign national after convicting her of child abuse resulting in death under the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Punishment of Child Abuse Crimes, according to legal sources on Wednesday.

The court also ordered her to complete a 40-hour child abuse treatment program and barred her from working at child-related institutions for five years.

Prosecutors said the woman abandoned her son in front of a warehouse in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang, on Jan. 10, a day after giving birth. The infant later died of hypothermia.

She was found to have committed the crime after losing contact with the child's father, who had returned to China, and falling into financial hardship.

"The nature of the crime is extremely serious because she committed it against her own child, who should have been protected," the court said.

“We’ve taken into account that she had been raising a severely disabled child from her previous marriage on her own, that as a foreign national she had been unable to expect assistance from Korean institutions and that she had shown remorse for the crime.”

BY KIM JI-HYE [[email protected]]