Police Rescue 37 Babies From Baby-Selling Trafficking Ring in China

International   |   Sarah Zagorski   |   Jan 16, 2015   |   12:47PM   |   Beijing, China

Earlier this week, China Central Television reported that authorities rescued 37 babies and a toddler out of an abandoned factory in the southwestern province of Shandong. The children were found in poor condition and many were suffering from HIV-AIDS and malnutrition. Police first became suspicious of the trafficking ring when they noticed that pregnant women were being herded into the factory.

According to CNN, human traffickers were recruiting pregnant women in the area willing to sell their babies and hid them in the factory until they gave birth. Then, after the women had their babies, they gave the newborns over to the traffickers and left. Police said that inside the abandoned factory they found diapers and other signs the building was being used as “underground delivery room.”

picchina32bThe babies were sold at a local morgue for anywhere from $8,000-$13,000, and a suspect named Wu told the police “boys are more expensive than girls.” Additionally, the South China Morning Post reported that the traffickers would feed the children instant noodles or some leftover vegetables while waiting for buyers. A Chinese police official, Chen Shiqu, said that the incident is a “new criminal pattern” in which child traffickers take pregnant women to a specific place to give birth. Currently, police have 103 people in custody who are suspected of selling or buying children.

The Washington Post shares more:

China has seen numerous child-trafficking cases in the past few years. In 2013, police rescued 92 children and two women and arrested 301 suspects.

The recent case is the result of a two-month sting operation in which the babies were smuggled inside handbags and luggage to a morgue at a hospital for infectious diseases, where they were kept until buyers arrived.

Police said nearly all 37 babies who were rescued were in poor health. Some had bedsores. One had been nearly smothered to death, trapped under heavy blankets inside the factory.

“At that time, the baby’s face was already turning purple,” police investigator Liu Yang said, according to CNN. “If we didn’t search through those blankets, that baby many have already died.”

As LifeNews previously reported, Reggie Littlejohn, the president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, explained that the brutal One-Child Policy is largely to blame for the trafficking problems in China.

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She said, “The One Child Policy is the driving force in trafficking. Couples who do not have a son want to obtain a boy through trafficking. Couples who already have a son may want to traffic a girl into their family, to ensure that their son will have a bride when he grows up. In China, the marriage market is on the road to collapse. Because of the pronounced gender imbalance caused by gendercide – the selective abortion of baby girls — there are currently about 37 million more males living in China than females.”

In 2013, the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Person (TIP) report revealed that China has refused to acknowledge that its policy is creating a gender imbalance and fueling trafficking.

For example, just last year, Chinese officials uncovered four child-trafficking rings and arrested more than a thousand people for using websites and instant messaging to sell babies. Unbelievably, a Chinese OBGYN was also convicted for kidnapping and selling infants after telling there parents they were sick in early 2014. Ultimately, the One-Child Policy has resulted in over 400 million abortions and nearly 40 million sex-selection abortions.