A newborn baby was found buried alive. The reason may have been her gender

Her arm was the first thing Shyam Babu saw, tiny and frail, poking through the mud like a discarded doll. But this was no doll. Covered with ants and bleeding from what doctors would later suspect were animal bites, the pig farmer had just made a terrifying discovery near a river in this north Indian village.

Wrapped in a towel, barely stirring, but slightly breathing, was a newborn baby girl buried beneath a foot of earth.

“I went closer and saw that the child’s fingers were moving. I went even closer and could sense a heartbeat,” Babu recalled as he retraced his steps leading to the horrific discovery last month in the sugarcane and paddy fields of rural Shahjahanpur district in Uttar Pradesh state.

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