The Los Angeles Times reported last week on a sinister side of some foreign adoptions in China:
Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.
The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.
But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.
Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.
“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.
Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.
