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Chinese Babies May Have Been Sold For Adoption
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by alia_d | July 2, 2009 at 08:43 pm
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Chinese babies may have been sold for adoption by officials in Southern China who took babies from poor rural families that could not afford to pay the fine, when they violated Chinese law by having too many children.
Authorities in southern China are investigating allegations that local officials took babies from their parents between 2003 and 2005 and delivered them to an orphanage that press reports said has offered children for overseas adoption.
The decision to investigate the issue follows press reports about the issue. Time Weekly, a newspaper based in Guangzhou, included descriptions of two families that claim their baby daughters were taken away by local government officials. The officials told the families that if they could not pay the fine for violating family-planning laws by having too many children, the officials would put the family's babies up for adoption. Moreover, the Southern Metropolis News, a state-owned paper, reported that 80 girls in one region had been sold for $3,000 to foreigners.
Family-planning laws are unpopular among rural families, who cannot afford to pay fines if they have too many children.
Parents in rural areas are allowed two children, unlike urban dwellers who are allowed one.
But if they have more than that, they face a fine of about $3,000 -several times many farmers' annual income.
However, China is not the only country where babies have been sold for a profit. According to a report by Foreign Policy, Western demand for orphaned babies is so high that some adoption babies seek out babies, many of which are not orphans, to take advantage of the demand.
Where do these babies come from? As international adoptions have flourished, so has evidence that babies in many countries are being systematically bought, coerced, and stolen away from their birth families. Nearly half the 40 countries listed by the U.S. State Department as the top sources for international adoption over the past 15 years—places such as Belarus, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Peru, and Romania—have at least temporarily halted adoptions or been prevented from sending children to the United States because of serious concerns about corruption and kidnapping.
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