On the chilly morning of October 20, a baby was abandoned in
Dongzikou, in the suburbs of Chengdu, Sichuan
Province. A number of people gathered at the site, but they all
remained indifferent spectators. No one called the police to report
that an infant was lying on the icy cement floor for three hours,
and by the time an ambulance arrived the newborn child had already
stopped breathing.?
There is no denying that baby dumping has become a grave social
phenomenon that is drawing nationwide attention.
In general, the infants who are discarded are born out of
wedlock, in violation of family planning regulations or with some
physical deformity. The overwhelming majority are girls, victims of
traditional ideas that value men and disparage women.
The child welfare hospitals in
Guangxi
Zhuang Autonomous Region take in more than 2,000 abandoned
babies each year, according to Long Zhihua, head of the Social
Welfare and Social Affairs Division of Guangxi's Civil Affairs
Department.
The discarding of girl infants has led to a severe gender
imbalance in the autonomous region. The fifth national population
census conducted in November 2000 shows that the newborn sex ratio
is 126 boys for every 100 girls in Guangxi, while the national
figure is 117 to 100. In Guangxi's Yulin City, the ratio reached a
shocking 148 to 100.
"In rural areas, only men are regarded as pillars of a family.
As a result, if a girl is born, in order not to violate the family
planning policy, the parents either send her to other people or
simply leave her at the hospital, so that they have the chance to
have a second baby," says Liao Mingde of Guangxi Medical
University.
The Nanning Child Welfare Hospital, the biggest of its kind in
the provincial capital, reports that of the 100 foundlings it has
accepted, only eight are boys.
In recent years, some people have seen an opportunity to make a
profit from the unwanted infants. In one case of child trafficking
in Yulin in 2003, a total of 118 newborns, including abandoned
ones, were illegally sold.
Similar operations have been uncovered in Sichuan, Henan,
Yunnan
and Fujian
provinces.
Part of the reason for the abandonment phenomenon is a
perversion at the grass roots of the national family planning
policy. Official policy states that if the first child born to a
rural couple is a girl, they may have a second child. However, some
local officials have turned this policy into an excuse for covert
"penalty" collection: the more money you can pay, the more children
you can have.
Local family planning workers are required to make quarterly
visits to pregnant women, but in fact many of them do not. Thus,
nobody knows exactly whether or not a pregnant woman has given
birth, let alone the whereabouts of the baby.
Reducing the number of abandonments to some extent, but
aggravating the gender imbalance, is the fact that some medical
workers conduct unauthorized fetus gender assessments, which is
responsible for the large numbers of abortions. Moves currently
under way to curtail sex-selective abortions may backfire in the
form of increased dumping of baby girls.
Loopholes in the Family Planning Law, Adoption Law and Penal
Code have made attempted crackdowns on baby abandonment largely
ineffective.
According to attorney Liang Biao of the Guangxi Huasheng Law
Firm, in cases of rampant child trafficking the traffickers
themselves were usually punished severely, but those who discarded
their babies have seldom been held to account.
There are legal provisions requiring parents to rear and educate
their children and prohibiting the maltreatment or abandonment of
children. Nevertheless, the Penal Code fails to provide clear
definitions, so that in practice it is difficult to mete out
punishment to parents who dump their babies, says He Jialin of the
Sichuan Hetai Law Firm.
In the countryside, where baby abandonment most often occurs,
poor knowledge of the law also plays a role. Many rural parents do
not know that they have actually committed a crime by discarding
their own infants, says Professor Hu Guangwei of the Sichuan
Provincial Academy of Social Sciences.
According to Long Zhihua, most abandoned babies are either sent
to child welfare hospitals, illegally sold or adopted. To a great
extent, Guangxi's baby abandonment issue has been resolved through
international adoption. Long says that so far, 90 percent of
discarded infants adopted in the autonomous region have gone to
foreign nationals. In Sichuan Province, an average of 200 children
are adopted by foreigners each year.
Domestic adoption should have been cheaper and easier, but the
procedures are dismayingly complex. The rigid Adoption Law requires
the would-be parents to be 35 or older and childless, and no one
may adopt more than one child.
As a result, some local family planning administrations have
assessed fines against single-child families who provide homes to
orphans or abandoned babies. Legally, their benevolent act is
considered "giving unplanned births."
Confirmation of an abandoned baby's identity is another red-tape
obstacle to adoption. "Although the original intention of the
policy is good, in practice in order to shirk responsibility the
police who first find the baby don't want to leave their names. In
that case, without a confirmed identity, the baby cannot be adopted
by a child welfare hospital," says Kang Jinhe, vice director of the
Social Welfare Division of Sichuan's Civil Affairs Department.
The resultant problem is twofold. First, black-market baby
buying and selling run rampant in many places. Second, beds in
child welfare hospitals are left unused.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs has seen to it that a number of child
welfare hospitals have been established nationwide to accept
abandoned babies. The Nanning Child Welfare Hospital, for example,
has more than 500 beds. But most of its equipment lies idle,
causing great waste, says Feng Chaorong, the hospital's president.
Sichuan is in a similar situation. The province's child welfare
hospitals have a combined total of more than 2,000 beds, but have
only received 1,794 abandoned babies so far, says Kang.
(Xinhua News Agency, translated by Shao Da for China.org.cn,
January 10, 2005)
