Mother admits abandoning baby in Birmingham park
A woman has pleaded guilty to abandoning her newborn baby girl in a park.
The infant was found in a bag wrapped in a towel in the Stechford area of Birmingham in October.
She was named Jade by hospital staff, after the dog that found her, then given a new name and put into foster care.
The woman in her 20s, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will be sentenced on 3 July.
West Midlands Police said the baby could have died within an hour if she had not been found, due to her low body temperature.
She was discovered inside the bag in a bush by Roger Wilday, who was out walking his German shepherd dog in the park on 31 October.
The baby, who was thought to be about 24 hours old when she was found, was taken to Heartlands Hospital where she stayed for a week while being treated for an infection.
She is now eight months old, has been renamed and is in foster care, police said.
At Birmingham Crown Court the woman admitted wilfully abandoning the baby "in a manner likely to cause unnecessary suffering or injury to health".
Det Insp Richard Cox, who led the investigation, said: "Jade was a helpless newborn child, abandoned by her mother on a cold winter day in a park, in a place where she was not visible to passers-by and where she could easily have been attacked by wild animals.
"It was only a huge stroke of luck that a local dog-walker stopped to investigate after his dog became interested in a carrier bag hidden in undergrowth."
Judge Murray Creed ordered psychiatric and probation reports to be prepared on the woman, who was granted conditional bail until the sentencing hearing.