"Child Abuse" — Parents Fly to Thailand With Baby Despite 104 Degree Fever

A mother and father are being slammed on TikTok for taking their baby on a flight to Thailand, despite him being sick. Alina (@alinamotherhpod) documented her son's journey in a series of viral videos that only seemed to get progressively worse for the family.

"A couple of hours before a long flight to Thailand, my 1-year-old son's temperature rose to almost 40 [104 degrees Fahrenheit]," Alina writes in a text overlay of her TikTok.

She records herself lovingly holding her baby as "Get You to the Moon" by City Sessions plays in the background.

The next part of the video shows her spouse walking through the airport with their baby, "My husband and I even wanted to cancel the flight. And our tickets would have been wasted and the trip that cost us $3,000 would have been wasted," she explains.

The video shows the couple walking through the airport, ambling through different corridors and hallways. Alina tells more of her story. "We managed to bring down the temperature and we were so worried about how the baby would feel on an eight-hour flight."

After her husband records her happily running with their kid through various hallways, they finally end up approaching the door of the airplane. She goes on to share her hope that the baby would be able to rest on the night flight and get his strength back up, despite spiking a fever.

"One plus of this flight was that the flight was at night and the child could sleep and recover."

Mom boards the plane as she's greeted by airplane staff, bringing her sick child onto a cabin of passengers who will be flying through the air in a sealed container and confined to the space for at least eight hours.

Her initial supposition that their child would be able to happily sleep throughout the evening on the plane was unfortunately incorrect. "But the flight turned out to be difficult, the baby kept waking up and crying."

Alina's clip shows her child thrashing around in her lap and crying. She attempts to put a pacifier in his mouth but he isn't having it, contorting his body. At one point he grabs his mother's ear with his left hand as she hugs him.

Her overlay indicates why the child might have been so fussy — his temperature shot up again. Being in a strange environment while being sick, could explain why he was in such a poor mood.

"We had to bring down the temperature again in the middle of the night ... We were very worried."

The next portion of the video shows Alina lying down on her chair during the flight as the baby lays down in an empty seat between the two parents.

"My husband and I were squeezed like a lemon, we took turns looking after the baby so that each of us could sleep," she wrote in another on-screen caption.

It seems that at least through this portion of the flight, their child managed to get some sleep.

Next up in the clip, the camera's orientation turns around to reveal her husband laying back and resting with his hand on their son, who was laying down with his legs perched up on his lap.

After they made it through the flight, they thought that everything would've been better. However, she writes in a final message that this wasn't the case. "When we landed we thought that everything was over and we could rest ... but the worst had just begun."

It seems that she couldn't have anticipated bringing a sick child into a foreign country on a vacation could've had bad implications. In follow-up videos, she revealed how her, her husband, and her baby ended up getting food poisoning on their second day in the country. This necessitated medical care, which she documented in several follow up videos.

TikTokers who watched her initial video expressed their shock that the couple would decide to go on the trip in the first place. Many mentioned that it would be worth it for them to lose out on the money they paid for a plane ticket if it meant ensuring their child was safe and had access to familiar healthcare.

Others thought that the parents' entire chronicling of their baby's illness as they boarded their flight was a form of abuse. "Truly demented to stage and film this video with your sick baby instead of just focusing on taking care of your child."

In a fourth video about her family's trip to Thailand, Alina's child seems to be doing better. She highlighted the different foods she fed him as he recovered from food poisoning which seemed to consist of rice porridge and his baby formula. Several videos of her child show him running around and being active as the couple is out and about in Thailand.

What do you think? Would you have still gone on the trip if your child was sick and crying and you couldn't get a refund for the tickets? Or would you have just rebooked it for another time? There must be some type of concession airlines will make if you can prove that a baby is sick, right?