Psst! Babies for Sale!
Psst! Babies for Sale!
Monday, Oct. 21, 1991PrintReprintsEmailTwitterLinkedInBuzz up!Facebook
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Five years ago, police in the resort town of Wadduwa, Sri Lanka,
raided a seaside hotel owned by a German and his Sri Lankan wife. The
building was occupied not by tourists but by 20 young Sri Lankan women
and their 22 infants, some just a few weeks old. The hotel was a "baby
farm," where foreigners looking for children to adopt could come to
browse, and for a fee $ of $1,000 to $5,000, have their pick of the
babies. The mothers, all desperately poor, would get about $50 in
exchange for each of their children.
The Wadduwa baby farm was shut down, but the international traffic in
children for adoption remains a big business. Every year, unscrupulous
baby brokers in Asia, Latin America and now Eastern Europe hand over
hundreds of children to North American and West European parents
willing to pay large sums for a healthy child -- and ignore evidence
that the infant was obtained illegally. In Peru, the traffic is so
open that some mothers have been known to stop foreigners in the
street and ask if they are interested in adopting a baby.
Last April, CBS's 60 Minutes secretly filmed baby brokers in Romania
negotiating with parents for the sale of their children to Americans.
"The word got out here in the States that kids could be easily had in
Romania, as long as you brought enough money," says a senior U.S.
immigration official. For David McCall, the adoption of his
Romanian-born son, two-year-old Adrian, felt uncomfortably like baby
buying. "When we started out trying to adopt, it was going to cost
$2,500," says the Houston teacher. "In the end we paid $5,000, and I
can't really tell you where all the money went. Someone is getting
paid."
Sometimes the question of parental consent is especially murky.
Severino Hernandez of Guatemala was five years old in 1989 when he was
adopted by Paul David Kutz of Rockwell City, Iowa. Severino's
grandparents, with whom he had lived since birth, say they never gave
permission for the change of family, and they are suing in Guatemala
to have the adoption nullified and the boy returned. According to the
Hernandezes' lawsuit, the youngster was secretly given up for adoption
by his mother, who never had formal custody. Contacted by TIME, Kutz
insisted the adoption was "100% honest" but refused to add any
details.
To stop the baby traffic, Romania forbade all adoptions by foreigners
until it formulates new procedures; it is not expected to begin again
soon. Few Third World countries are likely to follow suit. Ending
foreign adoptions would not necessarily stop the buying and stealing
of babies. It would merely, as one Sri Lankan lawyer points out, dump
thousands more orphans and abandoned children into the care of the
state -- a burden that neither Sri Lanka nor most other poor countries
are equipped to bear.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974092,00.html