Foreigners Banned from Adopting Children in China

In 1992, the Chinese Communist Party opened up the nation for foreigners to adopt babies. The Communist Revolution saw a massive surge in child abandonment, especially for female babies and babies with physical or mental handicaps. The world responded and parents from the around the world traveled to China to rescue the children. In 1992 alone, the first full year of the policy, about two hundred Chinese babies were adopted by U.S. families. The phenomenon was trumpeted by a 1993 Times Magazine cover story.

However, this year, China has stopped foreigners from adopting Chinese babies even though there are currently more than 159,000 orphans in China waiting for homes.

BTJ has been contacted by foreigners living inside China who were in the middle of adopting children with disabilities. “Please help. This is a matter of life and death,” one mother said this week, speaking of the child with a serious physical ailment that she was in the process of adopting before it was abruptly stopped.

In the last three decades, more than 160,000 Chinese children have been adopted by families abroad, half of which were adopted by families in the U.S. A majority of the adoptees from China have been children with disabilities.

From the earliest days in China, BTJ has partnered with missionaries running orphanages in the most unreached areas. Almost all of those mission-run orphanages have been shut down.

Though it is not clear why China has taken such drastic steps, it seems that the primary purpose follows a growing trend around the world which caters to the most primal bigoted tendencies. Communists, Buddhists, and Muslims have recently found it better to allow children to grow up enslaved in loneliness and poverty than to allow them to be raised by Christian families.