Two weeks ago a 17-year-old girl collapsed in a shopping mall in Hiroshima and was rushed to the hospital. At the same time a dead fetus was found on the floor in the corner of the mall's food court. The girl eventually admitted that she had just given birth to the child. On Aug. 9, a cleaning person found the body of an infant wrapped in a towel in a train station rest room in Hamamatsu. An autopsy revealed that the baby was born shortly before it died and that the cause of death was an injury to a blood vessel. On Aug. 6 a baby's corpse with the umbilical cord still attached was discovered in a plastic bag at a refuse collection station in Mie Prefecture. A 24-year-old woman who lived nearby was later arrested. She had given birth to the baby about a week earlier. In July, a 27-year-old woman in Osaka was arrested for possession of illegal drugs and when police searched her apartment they came across the remains of a baby in her closet. She said she had drowned the child five years earlier in a bathtub right after giving birth, which she never reported.

These four news stories appeared within the space of a month — and were not the only ones involving the killing of newborn babies — adding a dramatic dimension to a larger story that has been covered extensively by the mainstream media. In late July the health and welfare ministry released figures showing that the number of child abuse cases in 2011 rose for the 21st straight year, which isn't necessarily surprising since it has only been in the last two decades that local governments have addressed the problem and encouraged people to report suspected abuse. but the part of the report that attracted the most scrutiny is the section on "death from abuse." In 2010, 98 children died as a result of abuse, ten more than in 2009. When the number of children who perished in "group suicides" is subtracted, the number is 51, 80 percent of which represent children less than 3 years old. Twenty-three were less than one year old. If you expand the time frame and include all the children known to have died "through abuse" since 2003, the year the ministry started compiling figures, you find that between that year and 2011, 193 were less than one year old and 39 percent of those (76) died "on the day they were born." Ninety percent of these infants were killed by their mothers.

It doesn't take much deductive reasoning to conclude that these babies were not wanted in the first place. One can imagine the 17-year-old girl in Hiroshima slowly realizing that she is pregnant and suffering in silence as she tries to hide her condition from friends and family, and then going into labor in a shopping mall; or the 24-year-old Mie woman, who reportedly returned to her home town from Tokyo, presumably to have her unplanned child in secret, and when that happened she panicked and put the baby in a garbage bag.