Stealing Babies for Adoption

The Toerings already had three older children. Evangelical Christians, they adopted in China out of a sense that they were doing something generous for a child in need.

"If there's some mother out there grieving because her baby just was taken from her, that's just so bad," Susan Toering said. "Am I feeding into this? Am I causing others to say, 'There's a market for babies?' "

Those who have studied the foreign adoption program in China say its exploitation by traffickers is not a surprising outcome in this country still transitioning from communism to capitalism, where anything profitable is quickly commercialized.

"It's a corrupt system," said Brian Stuy, a Salt Lake City resident who has adopted three Chinese girls and operates Research-China.org, which traces the origins of such children. "It's just so driven by money, and there's no check and balance to the greed."

A state agency in Beijing, the China Center of Adoption Affairs, pairs prospective adoptive families with available Chinese children. Foreigners who want to adopt must work through a foreign agency certified by the CCAA. The process entails many fees, the largest paid as parents depart the province in which they adopt: They surrender $3,000 in cash, typically in $100 bills, and usually into the hands of the orphanage director.

The CCAA declined requests for an interview. According to its guidelines, the money is given to orphanages as reimbursement for the care of adopted children. But like many government-run services in China, orphanages are prone to financial abuse.

"Perhaps 5 to 10 percent of what's given by central, provincial and local governments actually benefits the kids," said a Western aid worker who has worked in Chinese orphanages for a decade and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his organization's relationship with the Chinese government.

A former worker at an orphanage in central China said she routinely witnessed local staff members carting off goods donated by aid groups -- medical equipment, blankets, formula. "The adults basically steal out of the mouths of the babies," she said.

Such is the system absorbing the proceeds from foreign adoptions. Whole industries have sprouted to service the people involved. Travel agencies ferry adopting foreign families to sightseeing spots in Beijing, then on to the provinces handling the adoptions. Playrooms occupy space at five-star hotels in cities that have become hubs for adoptions, their lobbies often packed with foreigners carrying Chinese babies. Around the White Swan hotel in Guangzhou, the city through which every family must pass to receive a U.S. visa for a child, streets are thick with stroller-rental shops and silk baby outfits embossed with traditional Chinese logos. The hotel gives each adopting family a special doll manufactured by Mattel -- "Going Home Barbie," the iconic plastic figure carrying a Chinese baby.

Assuming that each family that has adopted a Chinese baby has handed over at least $3,000, Americans last year injected about $24 million into Chinese orphanages. In many instances, the money appears to be put to good use.

"In the past, the living standards were very low," said Marcia Ma, a coordinator for Project Hope, which provides medical help to orphanages throughout China. "You would go to orphanages and there was a bad smell; the children were not clean. But now there is newer equipment for medical treatment and better hygiene."

But some orphanage directors have used proceeds from foreign adoptions to build profit-making homes for senior citizens, according to aid workers and orphanage officials. And a director for an orphanage in central China used foreign contributions to send her daughter to college in Switzerland, according to a former colleague.