A woman has been arrested after the discovery of seven aborted foetuses in a room she had been renting.
The shocking discovery was made when the mother of the unborn babies – a 26-year-old hospital worker who was identified only by her initials N.M. – moved out of the boarding house in the Indonesian city of Makassar.
The landlady of the boarding house, Nulfah Anugrahwaty, discovered the foetuses when she went to clean N.M.’s former room, only to be put off by a horrendous smell.
She tracked the stench down to four taped-up boxes in a corner of the room before discovering the foetuses.
Conflicting reports described the foetuses being found either in the shoe boxes or in a single ice box.
Police were called and tracked N.M., finding her in the Konawe Regency in South Sulawesi. Her boyfriend was also arrested in the province of South Kalimantan, almost 1,000 miles away.
The couple were taken back to Makassar for the police investigation.
According to reports, N.M. told the police that she and her partner had been carrying out the DIY abortions since 2012. The last self-termination took place last year.
N.M. claimed that she took an unspecified concoction in order to abort her multiple pregnancies, while her boyfriend would then help to extract the unborn babies afterwards.
Asked about the motivation for their actions, she said that they had carried out abortions in order to avoid the stigma of getting pregnant outside of wedlock in the majority Muslim country.
Abortion is illegal in Indonesia with the exception of some exceptional circumstances such as rape.
Police are trying to establish why N.M. kept the foetuses in her room rather than disposing of them or burying them. It has not been specified which charges the couple are likely to face.
According to guttmacher.org, researchers estimate that about two million induced abortions occur each year in Indonesia and that deaths from unsafe abortions represent 14–16% of all maternal deaths in south-east Asia.
Source: Mirror
