KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 24 — A steady trend of fatal baby abandonment cases in the past five years show a need for authorities to treat such cases as homicide, a federal lawmaker said today.

DAP’s Batu Gajah MP V. Sivakumar said such cases should be reclassified as a serious crime as the current punishment for baby dumping was “too light” to act as a deterrent.

“The law must be reviewed, and we also need a mechanism to trace and find those involved in baby dumping. We cannot just leave it as it is,” he said at a press conference at the Parliament lobby.

“These cases must be viewed as serious crime, because it is still killing. There is no difference in killing an adult and a newborn child,” he added.

In a written reply to Sivakumar’s question in Parliament, the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry said that there were a total of 417 cases of baby dumping reported nationwide from 2009 up to August this year based on police records.

The highest number of cases reported was 98 in 2011, or an average of 8.2 newborns discarded every month.

For the year to date, there have been 60 cases reported so far as at August, or an average of 7.5 babies abandoned monthly.

“We are only looking at reported cases... I believe there are many more cases that have gone unreported so the figures could be very much higher,” Sivakumar said.

Despite the consistent figures, the former Perak state assembly speaker said there has not been any indication that the authorities have done anything to address the issue over the years.

“There have been many programmes carried out to reach out to the public to deal with baby dumping, but looking at the figures, maybe the programmes have not been very effective.

“I ask Parliament to review Sections 315, 316, 317 and 318 of the Penal Code as they all deal with baby dumping... baby dumping is the same level as murder as it involves life,” he said.

The four Penal Code sections Sivakumar cited deal either with preventing the live birth of a child or causing it to die after birth, abandonment or concealment of birth by disposal of dead body.

The penalty for the various offences range from two years all the way to 20 years in prison, on top of a fine.