Rant: So I Suppose America Draws the Line at Finding Fees?

Forced abortions? Okay
Forced sterilizations? Okay
Coercion with violence? Okay
Coercion with threats to shelter? Okay
Coercion with threats for jail time? Okay
Coercion with impossibly high fines? Okay
Neighbors snitching on neighbors? Okay
Local authorities checking trash for evidence of periods to see if women are pregnant? Okay
Forcing families to register for trying for another child? Okay
Making it illegal for birthparents to bring babies to the orphanage? Okay
Doctors suggesting girls be brought to full term and placed in an orphanage? Okay
Police surrounding the house and confiscating the baby? Okay
Police confiscating the baby from the grandparents’ house? Okay
Police going in the hospital and taking the baby? Okay
Orphanage directors buying luxury vehicles with orphanage funds? Okay
Orphanage workers throwing out birthparent letters and trinkets? Okay
Police and orphanage documents with falsified information? Okay
Forced abandonment? Okay
People finding the babies and bringing them to the orphanage? Okay
Police finding the babies and bringing them to the orphanage? Okay
Police preventing birthfamilies from locating their children? Okay
Finders bringing the babies to the orphanage? Okay.

Finders being paid a finding fee?
Hold up! THAT’S UNACCEPTABLE! INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE! HUMAN TRAFFICKING! IT IS UNCONSCIONABLE CORRUPTION! HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS!

I just don't understand how people are totally fine with the story until that point!

I’m sorry, but why do all the articles act like human trafficking is the crime against humanity? The dark side of Chinese adoption! Kidnapped and sold! Dun dun dun!
Every “ugly truth” story prominently features human trafficking. And yet, I fail to see what was so good about the One Child Policy up to that point. I have yet to see an article about why the One Child Policy was wrong without mentioning trafficking, as if trafficking legitimizes the argument—the trump card.

So let me just say that the policy and how it was brutally enforced was the real crime against humanity. Everything beneath that was sanctioned in the spirit of upholding this law and receiving financial benefits for enforcing it on those with less power. It’s not that we should be upset because the finding spots are lies to cover up trafficking, it’s that we should be upset that families were forbidden to stay together, babies were taken from their families to enforce the One Child Policy, and women were given zero rights and subjected to inhumane treatments against their will. The crime, in my opinion, occurred from the very beginning of the One Child Policy: everything beneath this is simply a part of it. I see absolutely no ethical difference in adopting a baby from China whether that baby was confiscated by the police, relinquished under false pretenses, or was forced to be abandoned and whether that abandonment resulted in a finder who received a finding fee. If you believed it was ethical to adopt from China given that the One Child Policy was enforced with brutal crimes against humanity (forced sterilizations, forced abortions, etc.), then how does this international adoption program suddenly flip to becoming immoral the second your learn that finding fees were involved? They're either both moral or both immoral, and you've already decided which one it was the second you adopted from China.

Before, adoptive parents comforted themselves with knowing that babies were "willingly" abandoned, you know, the way people willingly do things to prevent themselves from facing dire consequences. That's the definition of coercion!

And if anyone actually read the research about the Duan family and the Hunan scandal, they would know how the traffickers/baby finders viewed themselves as saving babies by finding them in time, and that the orphanages and police and local governments were all in on the scheme until the local police wanted a bigger cut of the profit. In other words, a niche was already carved out by the One Child Policy for a "service" of baby finding and transportation. Of all the things I've heard about China's international adoption program, this whole business of baby buying is actually the very least heinous I have heard. In some ways, it just seems pretty trivial. 

Of course, trafficking was not the only way babies came to the orphanage or the only reason why a finding ad or "finding document" was forged. Learning to understand all these possibilities is devastating insofar as you realize 1) you've been lied to and 2) you're back to knowing nothing and trusting nothing about your origins and 3) it makes it exponentially harder to locate your birthfamily if you're actually from another province/area. Other than that though, the trafficking itself doesn't really bother me because I understand that it is so much different from what we typically regard as human trafficking. This was simply a: go out and find abandoned babies and we'll give you some money per baby, that is if we're only focusing on trafficking and not other pipelines into the trafficking system that could include other issues. It doesn't even compare to the police confiscations and the other instances of trickery and lying to the birthparents about what will happen to their baby.

I mean, how do you even define legal? In China, all this was legal because no one went to jail except those who made the international adoption program look tainted. Some orphanages even received permission to have a baby buying program, as they believed only by incentivizing finds would babies be found.

How do you define kidnapping? Is not a legal police confiscation of a baby just as much of a kidnapping as a local villager who comes to the house to take the baby, both receiving financial kickbacks for doing so? 

How do you define moral?
Is the Duan family a scapegoat for the Chinese government to say we have fixed the problem in order to protect the orphanages as One Child Nation implies? Or were they evil bad human traffickers as the Western news media would have us believe?

Most articles imply most Chinese adoptions are due to trafficking or kidnapping, yet how realistic is it that the majority of the 110,000 adoptions out of China were due to kidnapping and not due to the routine enforcement of the One Child Policy itself? As stated above, was not the routine enforcement and police confiscations just as morally reprehensible as the so-called "kidnappings"? In both cases, babies were taken from their families against their wills. But then, weren't "forced abandonments" also just as equally morally reprehensible? Yet no one thought the international adoption program was "tainted" just because of that, in fact, that was the impetus for adopting from China in the first place! Oh, so many abandoned babies, come adopt from China!

According to a Washington post article cited here, no adoptees were kidnapped though some may have been brought to an orphanage by a trafficker who received a finding fee. It is my belief that some babies were kidnapped but at similar rates as those not trafficked. In other words, kidnapping is occurring all the time in every single country including America.

If you just focus on what the Duans were doing, it needs to be on the "crime" they so-called "committed" which is a transportation service.

Everyone wants the peaceful story of the weeping mother and the abandoned baby in a carefully selected finding spot. No problems there! Let's adopt from China! The second that baby is picked up by a finder and gets their finder's fee. Holy shit! That's human trafficking!

Apparently, no one has a problem with the corrupt police who profited and the corrupt orphanages who profited and actually traded humans between themselves? No, because Westerners still want to donate to orphanages who then pocket the money to buy themselves luxury vehicles. No, because Westerners still want to support the orphanages by volunteering, psychologically traumatizing orphans as they do so because they have zero regard for the orphan's mental health as long as they get to brag how humanitarian they are. 

The West knew how the One Child Policy was enforced and the Western media framed it as a "humanitarian crisis" and "we need to get those babies out of there!" Well, how do you think that law was enforced? Was this not the true crime, separating families and babies and children? Apparently not. Adopt all you want! Donate all you want! Volunteer all you want! Orphanages who buy babies are good! The police who get a share of the trafficking money are also good! But the traffickers who actually scouted out babies who were forced to be abandoned because of this unbelievably inhumane policy?

In America, we only blame the evil traffickers.