Chinese Parents Allege Government Officials Coerced, Forced Adoptions

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 30 Sep 2009 - 1:00 PDT

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Some Chinese parents are coming forward with claims that their infant daughters were forcibly taken for foreign adoption, fueling doubt within the international adoption community about the legitimacy of some Chinese adoptions, the Boston Globe reports. According to the Globe, about 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad since the early 1990s, with the majority going to U.S. families.

The "conventional wisdom" is that the infants, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of China's one-child policy and a cultural preference for boys, the Globe reports. Although this is likely true for tens of thousands of the adoptions, some Chinese say that government officials took their children by coercion, fraud or kidnapping to collect money from orphanages. Some have said they were beaten, threatened or tricked into relinquishing their parental rights.

Ina Hut -- the former head of the largest adoption agency in the Netherlands, who resigned in August because of concerns about infant trafficking -- said adoption from China began as "a very good thing, because there were so many abandoned girls." She added, "But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market, and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money."

The Globe reports that the problem stems from China's population-control policies, which limit most families to one child. Families are allowed to have two children if they live in a rural area and the first child is a girl. Each town has a family planning office, which usually is staffed by Communist Party members with significant power to order sterilizations and abortions. According to the Globe, violators of the family planning policies can be issued fines -- called "social service expenditures" -- of up to six times their annual incomes.

The law "does not give officials permission to take babies away from their parents," the Globe reports. The Chinese Center for Adoption Affairs declined requests for comment from the Globe, but officials in the past have said they believe the abuses only occurred with a small number of infants. They said those responsible were removed and punished (Demick, Boston Globe, 9/27).

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