Psst! Babies for Sale!

Five years ago, police in the resort town of Wadduwa, Sri Lanka, raided a seaside hotel owned by a German and his Sri Lankan wife. The building was occupied not by tourists but by 20 young Sri Lankan women and their 22 infants, some just a few weeks old. The hotel was a "baby farm," where foreigners looking for children to adopt could come to browse, and for a fee $ of $1,000 to $5,000, have their pick of the babies. The mothers, all desperately poor, would get about $50 in exchange for each of their children.

The Wadduwa baby farm was shut down, but the international traffic in children for adoption remains a big business. Every year, unscrupulous baby brokers in Asia, Latin America and now Eastern Europe hand over hundreds of children to North American and West European parents willing to pay large sums for a healthy child -- and ignore evidence that the infant was obtained illegally. In Peru, the traffic is so open that some mothers have been known to stop foreigners in the street and ask if they are interested in adopting a baby.

Last April, CBS's 60 Minutes secretly filmed baby brokers in Romania negotiating with parents for the sale of their children to Americans. "The word got out here in the States that kids could be easily had in Romania, as long as you brought enough money," says a senior U.S. immigration official. For David McCall, the adoption of his Romanian-born son, two-year-old Adrian, felt uncomfortably like baby buying. "When we started out trying to adopt, it was going to cost $2,500," says the Houston teacher. "In the end we paid $5,000, and I can't really tell you where all the money went. Someone is getting paid."

Sometimes the question of parental consent is especially murky. Severino Hernandez of Guatemala was five years old in 1989 when he was adopted by Paul David Kutz of Rockwell City, Iowa. Severino's grandparents, with whom he had lived since birth, say they never gave permission for the change of family, and they are suing in Guatemala to have the adoption nullified and the boy returned. According to the Hernandezes' lawsuit, the youngster was secretly given up for adoption by his mother, who never had formal custody. Contacted by TIME, Kutz insisted the adoption was "100% honest" but refused to add any details.

To stop the baby traffic, Romania forbade all adoptions by foreigners until it formulates new procedures; it is not expected to begin again soon. Few Third World countries are likely to follow suit. Ending foreign adoptions would not necessarily stop the buying and stealing of babies. It would merely, as one Sri Lankan lawyer points out, dump thousands more orphans and abandoned children into the care of the state -- a burden that neither Sri Lanka nor most other poor countries are equipped to bear.