Pound Pup Legacy

A recently made film, Frozen River, shows how the want or need for money can lead to human trafficking.

When watching the brief clip, consider how much more valuable (and desirable) the life of a child is, compared to the adult immigrants hiding in the woman's trunk.  Trafficked children are sold for sex or black market adoption operations.

Human Trafficking... it's a job even a desperate mother can do, and you don't need a black cape or twisted mustache to do it.  And as the following articles illustrate, there are very difficult problems proving the correct origins of the child you may have already adopted.  [With facts like the these, how can anyone be completely certain infants being found for adoption these days are not being trafficked from poor desperate parents?]

ATHENS: An increasing number of people unable to adopt children through official channels are resorting to other methods in Greece, where private adoptions are unregulated and a traffic in babies is thriving, according to legal experts and the police.

Most of the babies for sale in Greece are brought here by impoverished women from Bulgaria and other Balkan countries, these experts say.

In the most recent case to come to light, a 16-year-old Roma girl from Romania is under arrest after complaining to the police that she had been cheated out of €14,000, or $18,000, promised to her by a British woman who allegedly abducted the infant in Athens during negotiations over the price last week.

But most prospective baby buyers are Greek. With birth rates in Greece the lowest among the original 15 European Union member states — 1.29 children per woman, according to EU statistics — adoptions here are steadily increasing. But, faced with six-year waiting lists at state adoption institutions, 9 out of 10 prospective adoptive parents prefer to sign a private agreement with a natural mother willing to hand over her infant, Greek statistics show.

This is perfectly legal in principle, the police and legal experts say. But the absence of state control over private adoptions is helping profit-seeking mediators, including doctors and lawyers, to hijack some of these transactions, the experts say.

"There are no illegal adoptions under Greek law, so illicit networks have plenty of room for maneuver," said Eleni Glegle, legal adviser to the Pendeli Children's Hospital in Athens, one of just four state adoption institutions in Greece.

The police say that babies are being sold — mainly in Athens, northern and central Greece and the island of Crete — for up to $33,000, with male blue- eyed infants fetching the highest prices. According to Bulgarian officials, most of the mothers are from Roma, or Gypsy, settlements in Bulgaria and are paid about $4,000 for relinquishing their infants.

"This is an escalating problem, the scale of which is impossible to grasp," said Lieutenant Colonel Antonia Andreakou, director of the Greek police's public security division, which handles cross-border crimes.

The main obstacle faced by the police is that the sales are concealed behind the facade of legitimate adoptions, and few are exposed.

"We need to prove that money has exchanged hands — as this is what makes the transaction illegal — but this is very difficult to do," Andreakou said.

The case of the Romanian teen mother, who is being held on the island of Cephalonia, is exceptional because she actually went to the authorities. The name of the 41-year-old alleged British buyer could not immediately be confirmed.

Anti-trafficking activists maintain that the infants' mothers are victims of traffickers. But other human rights activists counter that the women willingly give up their babies because of their desperate need for money.

From "Baby Trafficking is thriving in Greece", 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/18/news/babies.php

A more recent article (August, 2008) from Australia reads: 

UNBORN babies are being trafficked across international borders and born into slavery and prostitution, and are deliberately maimed and forced to beg, Chief Federal Magistrate John Pascoe says.

Mr Pascoe said pregnant women were coaxed from poorer countries with a few hundred dollars and deceived into believing their babies would have better lives. Instead, the women gave birth and did not know what became of their babies. They were not registered at birth and never officially existed.

Some were illegally adopted or their organs were removed for the foetal tissue for restorative or so-called health purposes. Some were recruited as child soldiers or groomed into athletes.

"These women travel and give up their child for various reasons: they may be coerced through debt bondage, have themselves become trafficked victims and become pregnant during their servitude, been offered monetary compensation and free maternity care for their child, or it may be that traffickers prey on their maternal instincts with promises of a better life for the child," Mr Pascoe said yesterday in a speech at a child labour and exploitation conference in Cairns. 

 From, "Women tricked into selling unborn into slavery", http://www.theage.com.au/national/women-tricked-into-selling-unborn-into-slavery-20080804-3pyt.html?page=-1