Facebook has deactivated sites discovered by PCIJ to be facilitating the illegal adoption of babies and toddlers, but new pages can easily be created. A 2022 law could address some complaints about the tedious process of adopting legally.
MANILA, Philippines – Facebook pages selling Filipino babies continue to proliferate despite efforts to stop the illegal trade online, an investigation by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism showed.
The online pages are competitive spaces. Several supposed birth parents have uploaded ultrasound pictures to entice couples who want to adopt. Paula said it was a coincidence that she found a Facebook group discussing adoptions in April while scrolling through her newsfeed.The single mom was looking for potential adoptive parents who could meet her conditions. “There will be a written contract…that I am consenting to giving my baby away, and that they are agreeing to adopt, and that they will pay for my bills and checkups,” Paula explained.
Estrada said she had coordinated with Facebook and the National Bureau of Investigation to remove these pages and track the perpetrators. “If we didn’t follow up, we wouldn’t get updates. They had too many requirements and they returned our documents a number of times because they said there was something missing when at the very beginning, they didn’t say that those [papers] were needed,” Nancy said.
Christopher also wanted to adopt a baby through Facebook because he and his partner could not conceive. He got discouraged from going through the legal route because of what a social worker told him. As of December 2022, only 1,369 children were being processed for adoption out of the total 5,875 housed in government and private orphanages, according to the NACC. The eligibility of most children was still being determined.
Siy, a former board member of the defunct Inter-Country Adoption Board or ICAB, said the process could drag on if parents were unable to submit documents such as the child’s birth certificate, or when a resigned or reassigned social worker did not properly turn over an application to a co-worker. “‘Oh I want a boy, I want a girl girl, the birth mother’s IQ should be this, Apgar score’… which is ridiculous,” Siy said. “These are the kinds of adoptive parents who have not overcome the grief of not being able to have biological children. Infertility grief. So they are trying to create a dream child.”
“She said she was raped by her boss, so we felt so sorry for her,” Nancy said. “And then she didn’t ask for money since day one. So, we thought she wasn’t after the money. She just really wanted to give the baby away.” After more than a year of waiting, the DSWD alerted Luis and Nancy in December 2022 that they had found a baby for them. But that didn’t mean they could pick up the child. They still needed to jump through more hoops.
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