|
Perils of buying a baby
(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Baby Be Mine (BBC1); Hyperdrive (BBC2)
JUDGING by gossip columns, Hollywood stars do it with monotonous frequency, and 300 British couples a year embark on the same quest - to adopt a baby from another country.
China is the favourite destination for finding an unwanted, abandoned or orphaned child, according to last night's Baby Be Mine.
Because of the government's attempt to keep down the population through the restrictive 'one child' policy, and a cultural preference for boys, China apparently has many thousands of unwanted girls.
But Paul Woolwich's documentary paid little attention to Chinese adoptions, focusing instead on Russia and Cambodia.
Russian babies, because of their perceived blond northern European appearance, are second in the league table for adoptions.
Britain bars adoptions from Cambodia, partly because of a scandal in America, where Lauryn Galindo - a self-styled ' humanitarian worker' who arranged, among many others, for film star Angelina Jolie to adopt her Cambodian son - was sent to prison for visa fraud.
Galindo arranged Cambodian adoptions to American families of children who had been sold by their parents for as little as $20: their new parents paid up to $50,000 per child.
More than 20 British families hoping to adopt Cambodian children have been left in limbo by our Government's ban. The parents, who had no connection with Lauryn Galindo's scam - one couple specifically want an HIVpositive baby - recently fought an unsuccessful High Court case to get the policy reversed.
But it was on the Russian front that Baby Be Mine, an otherwise run-of-the-mill gallop around a subject often aired on TV, delivered its sudden and sickening punch to the solar plexus.
We already knew that Russian orphanages, in common with those in the rest of the former Communist bloc, are a dirty and neglected form of warehousing for often desperately sick and isolated children. Westerners are not interested in adopting from among the vast mass of these hopeless youngsters, most of them beyond babyhood.
But through the video footage they filmed at the time, we followed Elizabeth and Dan, a childless American couple, to the Russian city of Perm, 800 miles east of Moscow, where they intended to adopt a baby.
Before they went, having signed up to an internet site offering Russian babies for between GBP6,000 and GBP30,000 apiece, Elizabeth's attitude seemed off-puttingly consumerist.
Her dream, she said, was for a blond, blue-eyed, baby boy: 'That's what I thought I'd get out of it.' In Perm, they were taken to an orphanage where they met the baby they'd decided to name Cyril.
Pictured holding the child in her arms, Elizabeth tearfully recalled: 'That was the most moving moment of my life.' Despite being told that the obviously underweight Cyril was suffering 'infections of the nervous system' (though the couple later thought the orphanage people had not been completely frank with them) Dan and Elizabeth instantly bonded emotionally with the baby.
Having to wait a few days while the adoption was finalised in the Russian courts, they gladly took the child with them to their hotel, where they delighted in their first experience of parenthood.
Despite their inexperience, however, they couldn't help noticing that Cyril was a very slow eater, taking half-an-hour to consume half a bottle of baby formula.
THE CHILD showed signs of diarrhoea, and on changing his nappy they saw the results of appalling neglect, for his bottom displayed, said Dan - and we saw the photograph - 'the diaper rash from hell'.
That first night, the baby failed to sleep at all. 'Was he teething?' they wondered, trying to get him to take a little mashed banana.
Then they noticed that his eyes were dilated and fixed. Elizabeth picked Cyril up to cuddle him.
'Oh my God,' she screamed at Dan in profound shock and distress.
'The baby's dead!' A less catastrophic, but nevertheless disturbing, experience met a British couple, Deborah and Mike, in Perm.
They were offered a profoundly sick baby born prematurely with multiple problems, including a hole in the heart, hepatitis-C, foetal alcoholic problems and an inability to raise her eyelids.
Their first reaction was despair over the whole idea of adoption, but they later adopted another little girl with fewer medical problems, returning to Russia three months later to bring her happily home.
It may sound cynical, but Be My Baby seemed to warn that as with any other transaction, and however good the intentions, 'buyer beware' must apply to foreign adoptions.
FOR light relief, Hyperdrive, immediately following on BBC2, made almost compulsory viewing.
The spaceship HMS Camden Lock was trying to settle a dispute in the year 2151 between two alien civilisations, but handled the process so ineptly that both sides declared war on Britain.
With no help forthcoming from London, Camden Lock's jovial captain, Commander Henderson (Nick Frost), was confronted not by the Nobel Prize for Peace that he coveted, but an onslaught by hundreds of enemy spaceships.
I've forgotten how they escaped but they did, and it was hugs all round as they released mutineer Jeffers (Dan Antopolski) from the fiendish torture in the brig of watching non- stop videos of gambolling kittens.
[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
|
INDUSTRIES
Activate Email 
Find Solutions for Enterprises, SMBs & Service Providers at the INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference and EXPO East, January 20-22, 2010. Miami, FL.
