What Stolen Children Mean for Adoption

What Stolen Children Mean for Adoption

A Guatemalan court has ordered a Missouri couple to return a child they say was kidnapped from her mother nearly five years ago and later fraudulently adopted. Sometime in the near future—if they're lucky—at least two, and probably more, Chinese adoptees may also be told that they weren't abandoned by their birth families, as they have surely been told, but stolen from them. The New York Times reported this morning that at least 16 babies were seized by family planning officials in Longhui, China between 1999 and 2006 (and the fact that 16 have been reported, in a country where such complaints are punished rather than investigated, suggests many more). The children may have been put up for adoption by foreigners. Sadly, that (or sale to a Chinese family planning to pass the child off as their own) is the best case scenario. Far worse would be sale to child trafickers for other purposes, and it's that "far worse" scenario that makes even a child whose life could be further disrupted luckier than she might have been.