There are two heartbreaking adoption stories in the news today. Sixteen people in Vietnam are on trial for allegedly selling more than 250 babies for foreign adoption. Read the whole story.
There is still a moratorium on adoption between Vietnam and the U.S. because of this sort of thing. It’s absolutely gutting for the Vietnamese families—and for the American families too. What a horribly heavy burden to wonder if the child you adopted in good faith was stolen.
The other story is out of China where parents are coming forward, telling stories of their babies taken, sometimes by government officials. Often the parents didn’t realize what the officials were doing was illegal and felt they had no choice.
There’s a telling quote included in this article by Ina Hut, who recently resigned from the Netherlands’ largest adoption agency. She says: “In the beginning, I think, adoption from China was a very good thing, because there were so many abandoned girls. But then it became a supply-and-demand-driven market, and a lot of people at the local level were making too much money.”
Greed corrupts--and is especially tragic when children are involved.
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