Baby Box – Unwanted Babies

Documentary.net staff — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 17:46:17 +0000

In this report, we follow a man who's dedicated his life to saving South Korea's unwanted babies. With hundreds of them being abandoned every year, why has the government ordered him to stop? Up to 18 babies a month end up in pastor Lee's Baby Box, a box attached to his house for women to leave their unwanted children in. "The babies that come here are the ones who'd otherwise die," he says. The shame of having a baby out of wedlock leaves many women feeling desperate. But some say the Baby Box encourages mothers to abandon babies without registration, slowing down the adoption process. Pastor Lee's been ordered to shut down his facility, but remains defiant: "There is nothing illegal about saving someone's life." The children are left in his purpose built baby box by desperate mothers, who feel they are no longer able to look after the youngsters themselves. A look at the sad stories of women wanting to escape the stigma of having children out of wedlock, and the heartwarming work of Pastor Lee in caring for them. But it’s a challenging job… new laws on registering births are making it more difficult to find adoptive parents, and some are critical of Pastor Lee for making it too easy to abandon unwanted children.

Spain’s Baby Market

Documentary.net staff — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:18:42 +0000

Imagine you've been told your baby has died in childbirth and years later you find out that your child had not died at all and it had been sold secretly to someone else. That is what happend in Spain during the era of dictatorship of General Franco. Spanish authorities are now investigating astonishing allegations that for over four decades government officials sanctioned the abduction of thousands of babies. It appears that the thefts usually happened in maternity clinics and nursing homes, with the active collusion of doctors, nurses and even nuns, and that state officials and civil servants then helped with the cover up. Once the babies had been taken - often from women who were known political opponents of Franco or relatives of those who had fought against him during the country's civil war in the 1930s - they were then sold or given to childless parents among the regime's supporters. Since the scandal broke last year, the number of cases has spiralled, with anguished parents wanting to know where their children ended up. Other claimants are people who have always suspected they were adopted and who now want to track down their true biological parents. But with records falsified, medical staff dispersed to the winds and officialdom slow to help, it is an almost impossible task. Braulia Banderas Franco, from Valencia, has good reason to believe her baby did not die as she was told. When she eventually retrieved the birth certificate she found that her husband's signature had been forged on the document and that the name and location of the clinic where she gave birth had been falsified: "The names of the doctors are false. Everything is forged. It says that my baby died at midday, and that's not true. Everything is a lie." Understandably the victims wanted the perpetrators brought to justice. But for lawyer Enrique Vila this is both a professional and personal quest. While he represents some of those demanding prosecutions, he says he too was adopted illegally and can not trace his birth mother. He now thinks the doctors involved should be in jail.

Baby Videos - The Documentary Network

Baby Box – Unwanted Babies

Spain’s Baby Market