Thursday, October 27, 2011

China: Black Market Babies

The Atlantic has a piece up on adoption corruption in China, leading off with the story of babies confiscated by birth planning authorities and sold into adoption:
This spring, the business magazine Caixin made headlines around the world when it uncovered corruption at Chinese adoption agencies involving children stolen from their families in Hunan Province and sold for steep prices in the international adoption arena. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. Adoptive parents are grappling with the news now that the myth they were once sold on -- that orphanages are overrun with abandoned Chinese girls -- has been shattered.

For years, even social scientists supported this narrative. Two decades ago, when the gender ratio first started to skew sharply toward boys, they assumed these official figures were distorted by millions of unreported newborn girls. The country's strict one-child policy, they reasoned, prompted a widespread number of parents to conceal their additional children to avoid harsh penalties. Because of an enduring preference for boys, they surmised, many parents hid their girls or simply abandoned them.

In recent years, that theory has come undone. "The more we look at the data, the more we realize the hidden children, they are not there," says Yong Cai, a sociologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They have never been born or they have simply been aborted." While some do conceal their children or abandon them, sex-selective abortion and poor health care for baby girls account for most of the sex ratio disparity for very young children, which now stands at about 120 males for every 100 females, Cai says.

Here, we tell the stories of families on both sides of the adoption scandal -- an adoptive mother in the United States who discovered her daughter's adoption papers were forged and a Chinese father whose baby was taken from him. We have not used real names to protect the identity of the American woman's adopted daughter and for the Chinese parent's safety.
Even without names used, it's clear that the story of the adoptive mother in the U.S. is the same one reported here by the New York Times (again, anonymously to protect her daughter's identity); the Chinese father's story is likely the same as reported in Caixin Century magazine.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

This article is seriously sensationalizing the facts. There are very few abduction cases for IA, when comparing the actual amount of NSN children adopted from China since IA began.
I'm not saying it never happened. But I am saying that this article is 1. outdated information, 2. concluding that there have never been a lot of NSN girls abandoned (which is counter to ALL other resources out there), and 3. brings any unimformed reader to the erronious conclusion that the entire IA program in China is corrupt. If that were the case, they would have been closed down long ago, just like Guatemala IA was. -Very poor and discouraging reporting.

Anonymous said...

I'm an adoptive mom, to a daughter born in China and I don't think the article is sensationalizing anything. The reality is very few of us known the origens of our children born in China, due to the lack of transparancy of the Chinese government. What is true is that the majority of finding ads (not all)contain made up information and are untraceable. If the China program is so ethical, why the need for the SWI to make up information? Until more adoptive parents search and meet the birth families and hear from them, the real reason why the child was abandoned, we'll probably never know how prevalent these "forced" or "fake" abandonments are. There does seem to be some indirect information indicating something wasn't quite so "kosher" with the China program. Why did the number of abandonments/adoptions of healthy children from China seem to skyrocket until 2004/2005, and then plummet (once reports of these scandals occurred), so that today, there are only half as many children adopted from China, as compared to 2004/2005, and now the majority of them are special need children. Something was (perhaps is) going on in the China program and wasn't just "random" abandonments.

Anonymous said...

I'm an adoptive mom, to a daughter born in China and I don't think the article is sensationalizing anything. The reality is very few of us known the origens of our children born in China, due to the lack of transparancy of the Chinese government. What is true is that the majority of finding ads (not all)contain made up information and are untraceable. If the China program is so ethical, why the need for the SWI to make up information? Until more adoptive parents search and meet the birth families and hear from them, the real reason why the child was abandoned, we'll probably never know how prevalent these "forced" or "fake" abandonments are. There does seem to be some indirect information indicating something wasn't quite so "kosher" with the China program. Why did the number of abandonments/adoptions of healthy children from China seem to skyrocket until 2004/2005, and then plummet (once reports of these scandals occurred), so that today, there are only half as many children adopted from China, as compared to 2004/2005, and now the majority of them are special need children. Something was (perhaps is) going on in the China program and wasn't just "random" abandonments.

Anonymous said...

Anon 2, what I meant by "sensationalizing the facts" is that out of all the years China has been open to IA, (comparatively) the ratio is VERY low on the scale of black market babies. I believe Hunan is the only province known to have that issue, and it was only for a small period of time before the guilty were caught and exposed. China, as you know, is huge.
I never negated the fact that it has happened, Im merely stating that, if one were to read that article and was not familiar with any other aspect of IA adoption with China, it would make one draw the conclusion that babies are stolen on a regular basis for IA, when in actuality, from what I have read, the black market problem mostly lies with domestic adoptions within China....BECAUSE of the gender imbalance, or fear thereof, which that article BTW, also claims does not/never did exist.

Anonymous said...

Also, do you know that the info is made up in the finding ads? If anything, I would think that the made up part is due in large part to family members claiming to find the child, etc. And so, possibly the family member claims to be a "person walking by the child".

I have heard that finding notes are sometimes forged, for the sake of APs wanting them so desperately...but to be honest, I have not heard of the "majority of finding ads" to be made up by SWIs. I have not heard or read that statistic from anyone with any reliable knowledge.

Anonymous said...

Also, just an FYI on your suspicion that IA NSN children skyrocketed till the sources were found out in Hunan...
We adopted our daughter in 2006. At that time, the NSN IA program was still very strong. The wait was only 8 months when we adopted her in 2006. One incident has very little to do with the other. As I said, the "scandal" was in Hunan...it was not something that was exposed to be a national event.

The "fact" as I see it, is that China made it too easy to adopt NSN children, and very few people were looking at the SN children for adoption. The co-orelation between SN adoptions going up and NSN adoptions going down, has to do with China making the SN program more desirable for parents waiting, than the NSN program. The hard, fast truth is that China does not want SN adults to take care of later. There IS no SSDI or SSI in China. SN children grow up to be less desirable adults in China, for the country itself to benefit from. Sounds harsh, but the beggars in China tend to be SN adults. They cannot be productive "workers" for the government, which, we all know is what's bringing China into a superpower.

Anonymous said...

To the 1st Anon:

You can rationalize all you want but the China program is for the most part, corrupt. Yes, there have been family planning confiscations in other provinces. You just have to search for them (Zhenyuan, Guizhou province). These are only the ones we know about. I'm sure there are MANY that we'll never know about. I know of over 200 adoptive families currently searching for birth family in China. Guess how many have been successful by following up the details in the finding ads? VERY, VERY few. Have you tried following up the details in your child's finding ad? I have and found ample evidence, from several different sources, that my daughter's entire group of girls (10) all had made up finding ads. If you don't do the research, you'll never learn all this and just continue to rationalize.

Anonymous said...

That article is crap, the orphanages over there are full of babies, the Chinese cannot take care of all of them, and they should be moving them out at a much faster rate than they are, or else getting rid of the one child policy. It IS indeed a corrupt system, and until the GOVERNMENT is taken care of, the children should not be the ones left to suffer.