Chinese babies stolen by officials for foreign adoption

"The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: 'Bring out the baby.'"

Very sad story from the LA Times:

"Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States...

"Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 [about six times the annual income in rural China and usually handed over in new $100 bills] per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.

"Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States."

The US government stopped allowing its citizens to adopt from Cambodia since 2001, citing concerns over Cambodia's "child welfare" (read: "child trafficking") system. Here is a 2007 update from Cambodia adoption connection:

"Cambodia has begun this process with its accession to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in March 2007. However, the U.S. Government continues to wait for Cambodia to take further steps towards Convention implementation as well as to make progress on updating its overall child welfare system. The U.S. Government will continue to urge Cambodian officials to develop significant and much needed reforms that could eventually lay the groundwork for a resumption of intercountry adoptions between Cambodia and the United States."

One of my friends is unable to go back to the US with a few of her adopted Cambodian children because of this ban on Cambodian adoptions.