On a cold May morning in 1967, a desperate new mother decided to abandon her newborn baby girl under some rose bushes in North Toronto. The baby girl managed to survive only because a young boy found her.

Now, 50 years later, that baby is a grown woman, fighting to make sure other mothers who don’t want their babies have better options than abandoning them in a garden.

Lisa Hill says she always knew she was adopted, but she didn’t know the circumstances until she was 25 years old.

That’s when she learned, from Children’s Aid, that there was no record of her parents’ names because she had been abandoned – a revelation that she admits left her stunned.

“I was definitely angry, then sadness. I thought, ‘Imagine what you went through as a woman, and you had this baby, and you don’t see any other choice but to leave this baby in a rosebush?’ Things have to be pretty scary, sad, dark for you to have no other choice,” Hill told CTV News.

Now 50, a university graduate with a successful career, and a mother of two, Hill says she often wonders what was going through her birth mother’s head that day.

“Now that I am a mother, I question, “How could you? Why didn’t you have another choice, call for help? Where were the other options?”” she says.

When Hill began searching for her roots, she found newspaper clippings of her abandonment that day in 1967. In the articles was the name of the boy who found her -- Scott Elliott -- and his family address. She soon learned that Elliott’s family was still living in the same house and she reached out to him.

The two have been close friends ever since. Hill even calls Elliott her “hero.”

For Elliott, he will never forget the day he was nine years old and found Hill tucked behind the rose bushes near his family home.

She was clothed in nothing but a washcloth, her umbilical cord still attached. Elliott picked her up and brought her home, where his family called police. The day is forever etched into his heart.

“If I didn’t find her she probably would’ve died of exposure,” he says. “I get emotional every time I talk about her.”

Elliott grew up and went on to a long career with the Toronto police, but he says finding Hill profoundly affected his life.

“I’ve seen a lot of things but I think this was the one that really affected me. It’s helped me understand single mothers,” he says.

Elliott and Hill’s shared experience recently brought them to a funeral chapel for the funeral of Baby Boy Richards, a newborn whose body was found in a dumpster, wrapped in a grocery bag, in 2016.

Hill said she wanted to attend the funeral, which was organized by a group called Abuse Hurts, to honour a life that was only just beginning.

“This can’t continue. This can’t happen anymore,” she said.

“To see that, so many years later, that this is continuing and women are feeling so distraught with no options, that they have to abandon their child and that child never gets a chance, it is very sad,” she said.

Hill and Elliott say they support Abuse Hurts’ efforts to request legislation that would allow mothers to drop off unwanted babies at safe places, such as hospitals, with no questions asked.

“How hard can it be to put legislation through just to save one more baby,” says Elliott.

As for her personal story, Hill is considering the idea of writing a book about her unusual journey. In her decision to tell her story to CTV for the first time, she has a message for the woman who left her.

“My own hope is that my biological mother would wonder about me, you know? I’m O.K.”

With a report from CTV medical specialist Avis Favaro and producer Elizabeth St. Philip