But for one minute just imagine that the scenario is true. The orphanage decides to pay a finder fee for people who bring in babies to prevent them from being left to die.

How would they advertise this fact? Would they put it on the radio or in the newspaper: “Hey! If you find any illegally abandoned babies, bring them to us and we will pay you!”

Whether it is publicized or not, how is that not an incentive for someone to go looking for babies? What are the odds that this freak occurance of stumbling across an abaondoned baby would happen to someone who just happened to know about the orphanage incentive program? What is to stop someone from taking it upon themselves to go FIND some babies?

To me, this has to be one of the most ridiculous ways to justify the fact that finders fees are not encouraging trafficking. A finders fee would CREATE a system where rounding up babies is worthwhile.

I haven’t read all of the comments on other online boards about the practice of SWI’s paying babyfinders, nor do I personally want to defend it. I also fear that it might encourage people to ‘find’ babies who have not been abandoned. However, based on the half-dozen comments that I did read, I believe that at least some of the people who were defending the idea of small amounts of money changing hands if an abandoned baby were delivered to an SWI were justifying the practice as a way of preventing what Brian St.uy wrote that he witnessed during one of his trips to China.

In a blog post he wrote on March 22, 2007, entitled ‘Child Abandonment from the Inside III’ (sorry, there’s no permanent link to the post. you can find it by going to the May archives for his blog here: http://research-china.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html) Mr St.uy says that he personally saw and attempted to help an 18-day-old baby girl who was abandoned at the gates of a Buddhist temple with a red note tucked in next to her. The child was not taken to an orphanage; the nuns at the temple told him that the SWI would charge the temple for the cost of the care of the baby. Instead the baby was allowed to freeze to death.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/11/world/main3924200.shtml

On the second page of the article, it says,

“If fraud is proven, whatever the reason, Guatemala would invalidate the adoption and try to recover the child, even one that has already become a U.S. citizen.

“We would have to do that, according to the law,” Gordillo said.

Custody disputes with Guatemala for babies already in the United States would eventually land before a judge in the adoptive family’s hometown, according to the U.S. Embassy.”

I’m curious, procedurally, how that would work. It seems to me that Guatamala would have to file suit in the Federal Court that had jurisdiction over the area of the US the child is living in. And I would think that the standard the judge hearing the case would have to consider is “best interest of the child” (this is standard for the consideration in custody issues, and I would think this would fall into the broad category of ‘custody’ – but, there would also be the issue of whether or not the child obtained his or her citizenship through fraud – the more I think about it, the more a nightmare it seems – procedurally and emotionally.)

Gretchen