Originally published at American Family. Please leave any comments there.

If you read my comments the other day, you would have seen a mention by MIJK of the Dutch TV show that aired last night about children who are not voluntarily relinquished being placed in international adoptions. 

I haven’t seen any full translations yet, but this is my understanding of the content of the show (as gleaned from several internet sources):

A) In the Hunan scandal, the Chinese government insisted that NONE of the trafficked children were adopted internationally.  In this program, it was claimed that there is documented proof that at least one of these children was adopted to Canada.  On this girl’s finding paperwork, the leader of the child trafficking group was named as the finder.

B) There is evidence of children being taken from their parents by family planning officials and later placed for international adoption.  I believe this was also in Hunan province.  And I think it said at least 17 children.  In one case, one of a pair of twins was taken and when her parents went to claim her after raising the necessary money to pay the 2nd child fine, they were told she had been adopted overseas.  There may have been other relatives of other children who had similar stories (?).

There are people out there in the Chinese adoption community that want to say this is old news.  If this information can be documented, it is NOT old news.  While it is generally accepted that children are trafficked in China, it was previously believed these children were trafficked internally and did not enter the international adoption system.  (Despite some anecdotal evidence this may have happened in the past…though I don’t know that this case was ever brought to the attention of the authorities.  Read page 10 of that link.)

If there is proof that trafficked children are entering the international adoption pool with fabricated documents, it is very likely that the US and other receiving countries will shut down the China adoption program.

Additionally, trafficking of children may even place completed adoptions at risk.  In the NY times article yesterday about some irregularities in Guatemala, there is a mention of returning a child adopted in the US to her birthfamily because she was adopted with false documents.  I can’t find the link, but there was another story in the last year about a child adopted out of India who had been kidnapped and sold to an orphanage.  I think that the child was in the process of being returned to his birth family (Does anyone know where I can find this article?).

I am not trying to whip up hysteria, but the whole thing is more than a little scary.  Ethical adoptions obviously protect children and birth families, but they also protect adoptive families. 

You can read more about this story here.

Edited to add:  It turns out the link I had in the first paragraph was the addtional information on the show’s website.  The full show can be found here.  Click on the baby photo.  If I can find a transcript in English, I will let you know.