Chinese baby-trafficking convictions prompt claim of injustice

BEIJING — Liang Guihong is a goodhearted 56-year-old woman who finds homes for abandoned infants. Or she's a leader of a gang that sold abducted babies, some of whom were adopted abroad.

A court in southern China sentenced Liang last month to 15 years in prison after she was convicted, along with an orphanage director and eight others, of selling scores of babies — 78 of them last year alone.

Supporters say Liang and the others passed on foundlings to orphanages for free and are victims of a miscarriage of justice prompted by official zeal to stamp out China's black market in abducted or purchased babies.

The case is acutely sensitive for China, where thousands of babies are adopted every year by Americans and other foreigners, and the government wants to assure adoptive parents and its own public that the children are well-treated.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing says it has asked Chinese officials, who have a respected adoption system, to look into Liang's case and confirm that any babies adopted by Americans were orphaned or abandoned, not abducted or sold.

"It's certainly a nightmare for any adoptive parent to have that seed of doubt," said Meghan Hendy, executive director of the Joint Council on International Children's Services in Alexandria, Va., an association of adoption agencies and parents' groups.

"The adoption community wants orphans to find homes, not children who may have had a family that could have taken care of them in their own country," she said.

Thousands of babies are abandoned every year in China. Many are girls given up by couples who, bound by rules that limit most urban families to one child, want to try to have a son. Others are left at orphanages or by the roadside by unmarried mothers or poor families.

The United States is the No. 1 destination for Chinese babies adopted abroad. According to Hendy, Americans adopted a record 7,906 children from China last year, bringing the total since 1989 to 48,504.

At the same time, thousands of Chinese babies also are abducted or bought each year by traffickers and sold to families that want another child, a servant or a future bride for a son.

China's system is meant to ensure that all adoptees are orphaned or abandoned. Foreign parents are matched with children by the government's China Center for Adoption Affairs and are barred from dealing directly with orphanages.