IT IS an amazing story that we tell on our front page today. A two-day-old baby was abandoned nearly 50 years ago in a telephone box in Darlington; now, after a brush with mortality, she is seeking to discover who she really is, who her natural mother is.

Perhaps the most amazing part of the story is that that baby, left so utterly helpless and vulnerable, was fortunate enough to find so many people prepared to rescue her and care for her for years until she reached an age when she could fend for herself.

The story also gives us a chance to reflect on how society has moved on in the intervening years. We are regularly told that things were better in the good old days, but now we do understand a little more and condemn a little less. Society's values have changed so that it is no longer a complete fall from grace to have a baby at a very young age. Families and communities are a little more prepared to rally round without fear of being shamed for ever by such an accident.

In the intervening years, society as a whole has also become wealthier. There are still too many families who seriously struggle to make ends meet, but through the development of the welfare state, there is no longer the prospect of lifelong grinding poverty that might once have driven a mother to abandon her baby.

Some might argue that these developments have contributed to the growth of today's more promiscuous society. But to the young women who find themselves in such a predicament, it must be a little reassuring to know that they are not going to be condemned as an outcast nor forced to live in penury.

In many ways, it must have been a very brave decision for the mother to abandon her daughter. In her state of anxiety, she must have concluded that this was the only way her daughter could be guaranteed a better life.

And now, if she is still alive, she has another very brave decision to make.

Should she come forward or remain unknown?

She may fear that coming forward might jeopardise the security of the life she has built over the last 50 years, but because society has moved on since then, no one will hold events of five decades ago against her.

If she chooses to remain anonymous, she will surely force herself to live with many, many unanswered questions - questions she probably doesn't know exist, just like her daughter didn't know they existed until a nurse's question in a cancer clinic - "what is your family history?" - brought it home to her.

And she would also be denying herself the last opportunity to help her baby, for, after 49 years, her daughter clearly needs her natural mother more than any time before