Stealing Babies for Adoption

Little of that is evident to foreigners, who are allowed to visit only the better orphanages. When the Toerings went to Hunan to pick up Stacie last August, they wanted to visit the Hengyang City orphanage but were denied permission.

"As a mother, I needed to see where she had been for 10 months," Toering said. "The guide said it wasn't up to the standard and we weren't allowed to go."

Many families adopting in China cite a record of transparent dealings with the CCAA and the ready availability of healthy infants.

"Many come from rural areas where birth mothers don't have money to buy cigarettes and alcohol," said Lindsay Yeakley, public affairs director at Great Wall China Adoption in Austin, a nonprofit organization that has placed about 5,000 Chinese children in American homes over the past decade.

Adopting families take pride in providing needed homes. But the growth of the foreign adoption program has prevented some Chinese orphans from finding homes in China. With each healthy infant now potentially worth $3,000 to an orphanage director through a foreign adoption, many institutions have put up barriers to domestic adoptions, according to sources familiar with the process.

Last year in the city of Kunming, He Fen and her husband decided to adopt a baby girl. But when they approached the director of a local orphanage, he told them they would need an endorsement from a major state-owned company or government institution, she said, making her husband -- a private merchant -- ineligible. They would have to pay about $750.

"Foreigners from the United States and Europe adopt so many babies from China, and all they have to do is pay some money," she said. "Why has it become so difficult for Chinese people?"

Long before the advent of foreign adoption, baby trafficking was a problem in China. Some children are sold into prostitution. Others -- mostly boys -- have been purchased or abducted, then sold to childless couples. But the recent revelations of trafficking in Guangdong and Hunan show how an underground industry has tapped into the most lucrative pipeline, connecting traffickers in China with families overseas.

Located in central Hunan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, Hengyang is a desolate city. Abandoned factories sit lifeless. Soot stains the walls of decrepit housing.

Local officials declined requests for interviews. But sources familiar with the prosecution confirmed accounts in the state press that the center of trafficking was the Hengyang County orphanage, a white-tiled, three-story building set behind a brick wall.

The first sign that something was amiss was the wealth that began to emerge, according to a lawyer involved in the prosecution and people living near the orphanage. Staffers began erecting new houses. The director navigated the area's muddy roads in a chauffeured sedan. They were purchasing infants from traffickers, then selling them to other orphanages for foreign adoption, according to the prosecution source. Traffickers based in Guangdong were abducting and buying infants, then carrying them to Hengyang by bus and train, the lawyer said. They were targeting the children of migrant workers, figuring that such families were less likely to be taken seriously by the police.

Last November, a stranger carried off Li Meilan's 7-month-old daughter as she played in a garden in Dongguan, a factory town in Guangdong. Li came from a village in Jiangxi province, one of China's poorest. The police treated her with disdain, she said. "They acted as if I had lost a dog."