Sick, sick, sickening:
Driven by acute poverty, a mother in Orissa sold her 20-day-old daughter to a neighbour for Rs 600 (about $13), media reports in Bhubaneswar said on Friday.
Kusum Majhi, 27, of Palisipada village in Kalahandi district, hit by drought and famine several times over the past decade, sold her second child to Dhanu Naik, a middle-aged labourer on Thursday, the Oriya daily Samaja reported.
…Kusum and her mother Sebati, 60, searched for a buyer in the village over the past few days, and Dhanu Naik showed interest in buying the child for Rs 600, the newspaper said.
…The sale of the baby was formally executed on Thursday in the presence of several other villagers, with Naik and Kusum submitting a document to the village council to avoid “future legal complications”, the report said.
How is this POSSIBLY legal?? 🙁
Well, it’s like marriage except with a smaller dowry payment (ducking to avoid getting hit by all the pots, pans and brickbats being hurled my way. Hey! This is the home of snark and wit — I’m snarking about marriage not child slavery!)
How is this different from any other adoption? Poor families around the world sell their children to Western couples, don’t they? Or sell them to all kinds of shady people (ike sex slave traders) and no one seems to stop anything but the prostitution, not the actual sale. It’s not the selling of children that’s illegal (and hey, legally a woman can rent her uterus out, but not the bit directly below), so what is it precisely that’s disturbing about this particular transaction?
just another gori- your comment is disturbing. if the woman in question couldn’t care for her child, adoption would’ve been a more appropriate choice than monetary gain. i’m not aware of poor couples selling their children in any LEGAL or moral way. there are plenty of people who are outraged about children sold to sex traders, it’s not just the prostitution…you know what? i almost feel like you are so warped, you’re not worth replying to…i’m fairly sure i’ve wasted my time, so i’ll end here. where you get your…reactions…is beyond me. wherever it is, i’m glad i’m not there.
i don’t know exactly how adoption procedures work, but i am fairly sure that the mother is NOT COMPENSATED for the child. The costs of adoption, I believe, are mostly legal costs – those that make sure the adoption is above ground in the first place.
Selling your children is a scary thought, both because it puts a price on human life and cheapens the notion of family.
i think gori is just not really informed about how adoption works internationally. I am not really informed either, but I do know that when people end up SELLING their kids it is a cause for great outrage. this is NOT an acceptable practice, anywhere.
For crying out loud, it’s called “playing devil’s advocate.” I’m asking why selling your children to the highest bidder is legal in some contexts, but others find certain situations “disturbing.” Why? Is it the assumption this particular buyer will “use” the baby for some unapproved and nefarious purpose? The guy in this story said he was doing it to help the mom — “My wife and I wanted to buy the girl because we wanted to help Kusum.” So what I’m asking, on a purely rational level, is how is this any different from adoption, and why is it OK to sell your kids to Western couples, but not to the guy down the street who’s doing you a favor?
it is NOT ok to sell your kids to western couples. Baby trafficking is not cool, for the reasons I outlined above. On a large scale, it makes children commodities. And you NEVER know what your neighbour or anyone else has in mind for the kid. Adoption agencies screen their applicants to keep out the weirdos, drug addicts, and pedophiles. If you arrange your own adoption, it’s a bit riskier. Bringing moneyinto the equation just shows that it is not all about the kid.
Reflecting on this a little, I can see how this situation would take place… probably no adoptive/social services, definitely not receiving financial support of any kind from estranged husband, the mother obviously chose what was, for her, the lesser of the two evils. But I still can’t condone it. I just can’t accept that selling a child is OK if you are really really really poor. Can you imagine the kinds of people that would latch onto this as a moneymaking scheme? it would be like the mexican coyotes, only dealing with people who have no ability to consent to what’s happening to them.
The poor lil thing. Bet it was crying and everything 🙁 I would have bought it for a fiver 🙂
Hey, this is way sickening… err…
Where can I buy one ?