Officials in China Seized and Sold Babies, Parents Say

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

LONGHUI COUNTY, China — Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

But Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one December morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, Mr. Yuan was holding his 52-day-old daughter at a bus stop when a half-dozen men sprang from a white government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one. Both he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage.

Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about $745, to pay the fine he said they demanded if he wanted to keep his child. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/world/asia/05kidnapping.html?pagewanted=all

[tridim]

1. Damn! Don't tell Walmart.

[pnwmom]

2. So, so sad. Both for those families, and all the adoptive families

in the U.S. who will now have to worry that their babies might have been stolen.

All those lives ruined.

[MADem]

3. What recourse do these people have? Absolutely none. The government calls the shots.

There would have to be a major sea change in the way China is governed for anyone to even find out if they were or adopted a stolen child. I'll bet the paperwork has the biological parents willingly surrendering the child in every case....even if the paperwork is BS.

It's a dreadful thing, but China makes a nice chunk of change from their export of female human livestock. It's a win-win for them--they unload excess (future breeder) population, and get cash for their trouble. I would not count on the government to grow a conscience about this practice any time soon.

[BNJMN]

4. I wonder if China fears, thinks about, moons over us as much as we do it?

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/06/china_s_america_obsession

[Plaid Adder]

5. That's horrifying.

Years ago, when we were first talking about having children, we looked into international adoption, but we discovered that in many of the countries that do this there were serious questions about human rights. The most notorious case at the time was Guatemala, where it had become obvious that people were stealing babies or coercing mothers into giving them up and then essentially selling them. All in all, we felt that if we did an international adoption we would never really be 100% sure that we were not participating in something illegal and unethical and so we gave up on that idea.

But at that time, adoption from China was seen as safe and ethical, precisely because everything was so closely regulated by the government. We have a friend who adopted her daughter from China and for a long time we seriously considered doing that ourselves--until the Chinese government changed the rules to prevent lesbians from doing so. (It had always been officially forbidden but for a long time the officials basically allowed lesbians to pretend to be straight single mothers.) The story was that these children--almost all of them girls--had been abandoned by their families because of the one-child policy: since boys were still valued more, families would give up their girls in hopes of being able to conceive a boy as their one child. I'm sure there was some of that. But though it was not known at the time, I'm sure that there was always this coercion going on at the same time.

This all is very sad--not only for the parents in China but for the adoptive parents and children in the US, who will now all have to wonder whether anything the officials told them about the child's birth parents and their circumstances was actually true.

The Plaid Adder

[LibertyLover]

6. As the parent of a daughter adopted from China,

I am actually fairly certain that the story the orphanage gave us about how she was found is not actually true, because I've read too many reports from other families who went back to the orphanage their child came from, looked at the records and found out the story they had been told was incorrect - the child had been found somewhere else and on a different day. However, and I may be flamed for this, on reading this article, I have made a firm and conscious decision that I am not going to worry and beat myself up over the fact that I adopted a little girl from China. Do I think that she was actually found on a door step like the orphanage director said and that her birthday is really June 22, the same as my dad's? No. But I do believe that she was abandoned by her birth family due to their need for a boy. And because of their desire for a boy, I have been given the opportunity to be a mother to the most delightful daughter in the known universe.

[Blue_Tires]

7. Wall Street should love this -- the pure free market in action...

[bananas]

8. Uh-oh - hope this isn't what happens to them

'Supposedly, there was a rumor floating around that somewhere in China, pills made out of dead babies were being sold. A Korean television documentary team decided to track down the truth behind this rumor, and reportedly found a hospital that sells dead babies — mostly abortions or stillbirths, with “mostly” being a scary word here when you think about it — to medicine companies. The team found that when the hospital has a “deceased baby case,” the staff are instructed to immediately alert the medicine company.'

more at link if you dare
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1672166

[Hestia]

9. Good grief! Soylent Green was a documentary?

Disgusting!