Baby farming
| SRI LANKA |
Baby farming
Foreign adoption scandal
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SELLING Sri Lankan babies to foreigners has now become a virtual industry in this little island. Until the end of November 1981, 642 babies had changed hands and only nine of them were adopted according to government procedures.
The baby buyers are paying around $5,000 per child though the children’s mothers see very little of that — usually about $50 each. The real money is made by the middle-men. These are often well-connected professional people who have a lot of contact with foreigners and some are even hiring mothers to produce babies specifically for sale. A recent police raid on one of these ‘baby farms’ found three babies price-marked for sale and all at under three months old.
Many babies, however, are also parted from their mothers in government-run maternity hospitals where the nurses and doctors are alleged to act as the go-between for the buyer and the mother.
In a country with an average income per year of $200 it is not surprising that mothers will hand their children over when someone waves money in front of them. And adoption laws in Sri Lanka are such that it is relatively easy for them to do this.
Minister of Social Services, Asoka Karunaratne, admitted in Parliament that babies were now even reaching US Army men stationed in the Philippines, though with the law as it presently stands he said there was little he could do to stop it.
The buyers mainly come from Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Belgium, the United States and Canada. A major concern in Sri Lanka is that the children are mistreated when they get to their new countries and there is growing pressure for the government to take steps to put an end to the trafficking.
T.B. Peramunetilleke