Stealing Babies for Adoption

This morning we were greeted with a front page above-the-fold story in the Washington Post about the topic of Chinese babies being abducted and later being adopted by foreign families. While the intention of the article is to focus on the unseemly aspect of baby trafficking (which occurs in every country), one line in particular jumped out at me:

But over the past decade, a wave of foreigners, mostly Americans, has poured into China with dollars in hand to adopt Chinese babies, 95 percent of them girls.

As if all it took to bring home a child was to head to China with a wad of cash. News flash: All adoptions, foreign and domestic, cost money. They also involve a mind-numbing amount of paperwork and time. To reduce adoption to a simple cash transaction is to do a diservice to the many families who have waited years to start a family. Some have gone through expensive fertility treatments, some have tried other adoption avenues and and some even have biological children of their own and want to give an opportunity to a child who would not otherwise have one.

I know for a fact that any adoptive parent would be heartbroken to learn that the child they have welcomed into their family had been stolen from his or her birth parents. I know I would be.

To its credit, China has taken a particularly hard line on this problem. When the Hunan traffickers were caught, they were prosecuted and sentenced to prison time. I hope they are going after other such trafficking rings with as much zeal.