October 23, 2009

By Patrick B. Craine, October 21, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Canadian government has called on China to respond to claims that Chinese babies are being kidnapped from their parents and sold to orphanages so as to be adopted by Canadians and other Westerners, reports Canwest News Service.

The Canadian embassy in Beijing has reportedly requested that an investigation be conducted by the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA), the Chinese federal agency in charge of the country’s international adoption program.

This news follows an investigative report last month in the Los Angeles Times, which revealed horrific stories of babies being kidnapped from their parents by Chinese ‘family planning’ officials who later sold them through orphanages for a U.S. $3,000 adoption fee.

“It raises serious concerns, no doubt about it,” said Janet Nearing, director of adoption services for the Nova Scotia government.  “[CCAA’s] director-general has assured the embassy staff that the agency is looking into this matter.”  Nearing says that the director-general has assured Canada that “no children adopted by Canadians were [illegally obtained],” but she is not sure where he got such information.

Abduction and trafficking in babies is a chilling reality for Chinese families living under the anti-life policies of Communist China.  In 2007, the U.K’s Daily Mail and other media reported that approximately 70,000 babies in the country disappear every year, or 190 per day.

But child abductions and trafficking are only the tip of the iceberg of China’s violations of human rights.

The countries radical population-control policies have led to numerous atrocities against life, including forced abortions and sterilizations.  Under the law, parents are restricted to one child, or two if they live in a rural area and the first is a girl.  There is a ‘family planning’ office in every town, generally with Communist Party staffers capable of ordering abortions and sterilizations.  Massive and often crippling penalties, called ‘social service expenditures’, can be imposed upon families, at up to six times their annual income, if they have children beyond the allowed limit.

Shockingly, Western countries are actually helping China implement their extreme anti-life policies.  The U.S.-based Population Research Institute has demonstrated through repeated on-the-ground investigations that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is complicit in forced abortions and contraception.  While former President Bush cut off funding to UNFPA, President Obama’s government announced in March that they were contributing $50 million to the organization.

According to one documentary about the situation, the crushing family planning policies have, in fact, created a massive black market within China itself for selling and buying children, with many families desperately seeking a son to care for them in old age, or a girl to marry their son.  The horrors of China’s child trafficking problem are displayed in the 2007 documentary, entitled ‘China’s Stolen Children’, available online.

The government not only pressures families to limit their families to one child, however. As the L.A. Times learned from first-hand accounts, government officials are actually stealing children.

For example, in spring 2004, in the village of Tianxi, Guizhou province, one ‘family planning’ official who was dreaded by village inhabitants arrived at Yang Shuiying’s door and demanded, “Bring out the baby.”

“I’m going to sell the baby for foreign adoption,” he told her.  “I can get a lot of money for her.”  Assuring Yang that she and her husband would be spared the fine for violating the one-child policy, the official took Yang’s four-month-old to an orphanage in a nearby city.

However, while heavy fines for “extra” children as well as forced abortions and sterilizations are protected by the government, the law does not allow officials to abduct children.  But Yang, like many others, didn’t know that, and so she kept silent for five years.

In 2003, Liu Suzhen from Hunan province was dragged down to the ‘family planning’ office along with her 4-month-old granddaughter, where they forced her thumbprint onto a document that gave up the parents’ rights over the girl.

“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, the father of a girl taken in 2005.  He has discovered since then that she was sent to the United States.

The Netherlands expressed concerns in 2008 to China about corruption in their adoption system, according to World Children, the largest adoption agency in Holland.  Their questions were met, however, with threats of trade retaliation.

“In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing because there were so many abandoned girls,” said Ina Hut, former director of the agency.  “But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money.”  Hut stepped down as director of the agency last month, concerned about baby trafficking.

In Canada, the provinces are in charge of adoption, but are themselves incapable of addressing claims of corruption in other countries, says Nearing.  That must be left up to Inter-Country Adoption Services, a branch of the federal Department of Human Resources and Skills Development. 

But foreign-adoption programs are ultimately a matter of “trust” between countries, she said, with governments having little ability to authenticate the claims of another.

See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

On-the-Ground China Investigation Re-Confirms UNFPA Complicit in Coercive One-Child Policy

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