By Hilary White
GHENT, Belgium, November 26, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Belgian couple faces possible jail time for having sold their newborn child on eBay and for having registered the child under an assumed name.
A Belgium state prosecutor said, “The couple are suspected of registering the birth under a false name, which is an offence. That is to say that the name the baby boy was given was not that of his real mother.” The offence carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. According to iafrica.com, obtaining an adoption without official authorization, a charge to which the couple may have to answer for the eBay sale, carries a maximum sentence of five years.
The pair, who have not been named, are a man 26 and woman aged 24 and are under investigation by police and social services in the town of Ghent after it was revealed that they had offered their second child on eBay to a Dutch couple for an undisclosed sum.
A spokesman for the Belgian prosecutor’s office said the couple had decided not to keep the child because of money problems. The amount paid for the baby has not been disclosed but it was described as a “decent five figure sum” and the Belgian authorities have decided not to remove the baby from his “adoptive” parents. Het Laatse Nieuws reports that the baby was handed over to a couple from the Netherlands in the hospital parking lot shortly after he was born in July.
While critics are saying that this incident could be the start of the buying and selling of children over the internet, in fact, babies have been appearing on the internet for sale for some time. In May this year, police in Vancouver, British Columbia were called when an online ad was spotted offering to sell a baby girl for Cn. $10,000. The ad said “Must have!!!! $10,000, a new baby girl, healthy and very cute. Can’t afford and unexpected, Looking for a good home, Please call ASAP” and included a cell phone number.
In Salt Lake City in March, Police instigated a search for a baby girl who had been advertised “for sale” on a local online classified listing. The child was listed under “Baby & Children Items” at a cost of US $6,560, police said.
Pro-life analysts have long warned that widespread legalized abortion has triggered a vast cultural shift in western countries from the idea of a child as a gift from God to that of the child as either an insupportable financial burden or a luxury commodity that can be purchased or sold, or, as in the case of artificial reproductive technologies, made to order.
As early as 1986 the Catholic Church was warning that a fundamental shift had occurred in the way children were viewed. That year the Vatican issued a document, titled Donum Vitae (the Gift of Life) signed by the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, that warned that the artificial reproductive technologies industry had created a situation in which human beings could be bought and sold.
Calling artificial procreation a set of procedures characterised by a “dynamic of violence and domination,” the document said, “The abortion-mentality which has made this procedure possible…leads, whether one wants it or not, to man’s domination over the life and death of his fellow human beings and can lead to a system of radical eugenics.”
“The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he be considered as an object of ownership: rather, a child is a gift, ‘the supreme gift.’”
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Christian Medical Association Condemns “Baby Supermarket”
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/jan/07010905.html
Feminist Revolutionary Warns of Exploitation of Women with Cloning Research
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/mar/05030303.html