Child Traffickers in China

Letter to the Editor of The New York Times

August 14, 2011

Re "Officials in China Seized Infants for Black Market, Parents Say" (front page, Aug. 5):

In 2003, on a brutally hot day in rural China, we were handed a strangely stoic baby girl. Our third daughter, she was adopted by us through China's international adoption program with the United States.

Like all families at that time, we believed her to be a legally adoptable child, abandoned by her birth family at the gate of the orphanage because of China's one-child policy and cultural tradition favoring male heirs.

Blissfully happy to be adopting, I must say that the facts behind your article were not even on our radar screen in 2003. But they most certainly are now.

So tell me, President Hu Jintao, how do you tell a child who has already spent years working to let go of grief over her birth family that her past may not be as it was portrayed?

That she was not a child, a person, a creature deserving of a better life, but may merely have been a cog in one of China's many industries, the industry of baby-selling?

Oh, and did you really think that this day would not come to pass? That your own countrymen would not one day rise up and say, "What have you done with our children?"

J. D. SAMUEL
Lexington, Ky., Aug. 7, 2011

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