IN a dialogue on international adoption at the website What’s Wrong with the World this week, I argued that child adoption should occur only within national borders. We cannot control the adoption business in other countries or ever be assured that it does not become a form of child trafficking, especially given the large sums Westerners are willing to pay.

A recent story in the Los Angeles Times confirms my point. According to Barbara Demick:

Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.

The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.

But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.

Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.

Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.

Sherwood Smith writes:

There is possibly a more sinister reason for the adoptions of Chinese baby girls: It is a great tool to promote China in the West. All those cute little Chinese girls in America are being used to make the West feel more at ease with China and make us foolishly believe they are a lot like us.

Of course none of the parents who buy these babies consider that these children grow up being called chink, or gook on the play ground, or that they have no natural identity racially or culturally. Many have serious emotional problems when it is all said and done.

Never underestimate what they do or how they think in China; they have an axe to grind after being ruled and controlled by outsiders for the last 200-400 years depending on how you count it.

You are fresh air to a dying West.

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