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Chinese orphanages buying babies for foreign adoption, investigation finds
From PerthNow:
Chinese orphanages may still be buying babies and offering them for foreign adoption, Sky News discovered in an investigation.
It follows a series of scandals linking China’s foreign adoption program to baby trafficking and the illegal confiscation of children.
Since international adoptions began in China in the early 1990s, more than 100,000 children have been adopted by foreign nationals. Adoptive couples are told by the Chinese authorities that the babies they adopt are either orphaned or abandoned.
But an undercover investigation by Sky found more than one government orphanage that would happily buy a baby that could have been kidnapped.
Though some orphanages said they no longer paid money for children, one worker at an orphanage in Hunan Province said they would pay £300 ($472) for a baby. The child required no identification.
“We’ll arrange to meet somewhere at 4:00am or 5:00am, you abandon the baby there, and then I’ll pick her up. That’s how it works,” she told Sky, during a recorded telephone call. When asked where the child would end up, she said that most adoptive couples were foreign. Chinese families, she said, were “not rich enough.”
The investigation follows claims by several Chinese families that their children were seized by government officials against their will and later adopted by foreigners.
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